


Emma & Regina in Rooftops and Super Love

by wherethewhiled



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Adults Struggling to be Adults, After Getting Together, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Established Relationship, F/F, Family Feels, Film Noir, Found Family, Mothers and Children
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:16:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12580592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wherethewhiled/pseuds/wherethewhiled
Summary: the bat and the cat alternate universe.  batman beyond beyond, set in the present, in which characters are borrowed and the timeline is loose.began as tumblr banter into episodic ficlets inhabiting the universe into a thirteen episode serialized story arc that gets dense and explicit at times.  there is slight graphic violence and sexuality, and i suppose grit and romance, and found family against the world feelings.  it's our favourite moms being supers, being adults, being done in by life.  slashed in throwback film noir shadings, graphic novel leanings, and the boring things in long relationships.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deemn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deemn/gifts), [Hoovahhoopah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoovahhoopah/gifts), [Elsodex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsodex/gifts).



> i've edited previous episodes from tumblr (from two years ago, yikes). nothing huge but significant bits and dialogue that clean up and will help galvanize the trajectory now that i have a clue what the story arc is. for anyone from way back interested in skimming those new details. otherwise, i'll do my best but there may be retconning involved (reason being i'm not a long form writer and learning how to be, haha).

 

_Opening titles.  Throwback noir, blues, double bass, trumpet.  The big city.  Fire escapes and a back alley.  There’s a streak, two shadows up above._

_The streets are wet.  A junky car.  A cat screeches.  And a hand, limp on the concrete._

_Up an apartment building, modest, renovated, industrial, brick.  Hovering at the one open window, drapes flapping, a bed is seen, and it’s two people, bare legs poking out of the sheet, entangled in the dim moonlit night.  On the floor, two crumpled black costumes._

_Show title splashed over top final image in a slanted cursive script._

 

_Episode Zero._

 

 

Having a partner is like being split, a gelatinous single cell pulling apart.

The comm crackles.  Between blows, it’s difficult telling the faint fussing from the impact and the gunfire.  Regina is first to pick up on the noise.  Kicking harder than required, the goon flips over the railing of the high catwalk and smashes into a truck, then some crates below that.  Deftly, she hops the railing after him, landing on top of that same truck.  Keeping her flinty bright eyes on The Dark Knight knocking back lowlife scumbags fifty feet ahead, Catwoman sticks an ear to the comm on her wrist.

“Bats!”  _Wham!  Bam!_

Emma’s head snaps up to steal a risky second to pinpoint her, and shouts, “Go!  Go, I got it,” before lunging right back to fighting the good fight.

Hitting the ground, Regina snatches up a broken plank and hucks it at a goon loping in on an occupied Emma.  Her left hand is out of practice; the plank clips him in the face, but only barely thanks to a bulky nose.  Huffing, she flicks out her bullwhip and escapes the dingy warehouse.

 

–

 

“Cat.”  Emma squints across the docks from where she’s crouched on top a stack of shipping containers, and identifies Montoya amidst the flock of SWAT and bright flashing reds and blues.  “Cat, the Dummy Squad are here.”

Regina scoffs into the comm.  “Of course, the cache is enormous.”  

Corruption has been on the brink of splitting some well-placed stitches in Gotham, and now crime is the status quo once more in a manner it hasn’t been since Emma was a kid – lawless and bleak.  

“By the way,” Regina says, evasively, “Sorry, I think I killed a few.  Or several.”

Except, she clearly isn’t.  Occasionally they’ll still fight about it, despite agreeing to disagree four years ago.

Emma straightens up, her shoulders square.  “How is she?”

“She’s fine.  False alarm.”

“Really?”  Her tone lightens.  “What is that, like, four hours.”

“That’s right,” Regina purrs, exuberantly proud.  “Now, can we split up, hmm?  Now that your friends have ruined the party.  I've had enough brawling."

"Not my friends.  The commissioner isn't even here."

"Those two sure think they are," she snips.  "I'm off to go squeeze old acquaintances.  You, go punch people."

“Yeah, yeah.  Okay, I love you …”  but it’s radio silence as Emma stands there, big cape flapping a bit, the rough skies blowing black clouds over the rounded moon.  

“Love you too,” Regina acknowledges after a while, both easy as she is out of breath, like she’s been sprinting too hard, traversing rooftops.

It’s not as though she’s ready to accept it as fact, but year after year, it is feeling like maybe they’re getting a little too old for this.

 

–

 

From high up top, the streets could almost be a comfort; lines on lines of asphalt running straight to the point and resolute in purpose.  An odd car zips by here and there, headlights hitting off shop windows, twinkling in the late, late night.  And to think she used to be afraid of heights.

The big city and her.  So many people, so many opportunities for a life to go to shit.  Hard to admit, but she’s been lucky at exactly the right times; the life Emma’s had, the things she’s done for this or that, she’s lucky she isn’t an abused junkie and selling herself, alone and emptied out.  

 _Thuddt!_   

Releasing the stitch in her brow, she loses track of her moroseness, the exact sound of The Cat dropping in on this one rooftop like a front door, like keys jangling, like the other half coming home.

“Come off the ledge, dear.”  

Emma notices a woman walking on her own, tracks her up a stoop and into a building across the broad avenue up ahead.  “I’m thinking,” she mumbles.

“I know,” Regina remarks, from the left, “and I’m tired.”  

Turning her head, she takes in the exhausted form of her partner: a fist jammed in her slender waist, leaning up against the ledge like her feet are hurting and she’s about ready to throw in the towel.  Emma hops off her usual corner and pulls the intractable woman to her.  Regina hums as she adjusts her every curve into her well-worn spot, head not quite fitting in the scoop of Emma’s neck because of her stilettos.  Regina shimmies some more; she’s lost weight these past months, and Emma frowns, mouth twisting down.      

“Regina.  You’re not eating.”

“I am.  I forget, sometimes.”

Emma stares out at the jagged skyline, suddenly angry again.  Gotham takes and takes.  “We should move.  Get outta here.  Cut our losses.”

Regina tilts back.  “I don’t want to.”

“That’s a stupid thing to want.”  Hard and fierce, a clawed glove jerks her face back around.  Rightfully, Regina is pissed.  It’s been a touchy subject lately.  “I didn’t ask to be some caped crusader,” she says, removing the indignant hand from her jaw but holding it close to her chest.  “I mean, Terry, shit outta luck, he needed someone.  I happened to be there, that’s all, before it all blew apart for him.”

“You say that, but eighteen years, Batman.  You’re the good one,” Regina says, her other fingers brushing the smidge of exposed cheek where the stern silhouette of the mask cuts across.

“The good one?”  Emma smiles, wryly.  “Am I?”.

Irritable and out of patience, Regina pushes out of their tight embrace, but Emma isn’t about to let them off like that, be apart like that.  _Half the heart-ache but double the effort._   That was their promise to each other.  Hauling her back in, Emma tenderly takes her lips in an open kiss, after kiss, after kiss, bringing them back to what matters most.

Soon - too soon - there’s a feeble hiccup and a gurgled wail, a kind of storm warning before their toddler is squalling for them loud and clear, right through the pops of static; the baby monitor is shoddily patched through the comm and she keeps forgetting to put it on her to-do list.  Foreheads pressed together, the pair chuckle at the sharp pitch interrupting their glum moment.  

She helps them remember better.  Remember that sad isn’t the only emotion, and someone needs them.  

Together they slink back down to their modest loft apartment on the top floor to soothe their baby girl.

“Sola, shh, baby, shh …”  their toddler is sitting up in a pout, round eyes watery and shimmering, hiccuping through some quieter sobs as though listening for whether it’s really her Mami or not.  Regina takes off her mask and ears, her long black gloves, before picking up their little girl from the crib.  “Mami’s here.  We’re right here, my sweet girl.”

Cowl off, Emma shakes out her hair, slipping pins out,  _clink! clink!_  as she drops them on a dresser.  “So, the shipments trace back to multiple known international dealers.”

“Someone’s planning something,” Regina says, relaxing back carefully into the one armchair in the room.  “Munitions being funneled into Gotham, and in limited distributions through multiple small, nothing outfits.  Imagine, going to all that trouble.  The big organizations all have their ears pricked, and I’m being told Gold might be making a move.”  Smiling, her features soften, bouncing their baby in her arms, wind-whipped strands falling out of the pins keeping half of that thick hair out of her face, the rest of it hanging loose and faintly kinked around her neck.  

Emma swallows hard because she’s been all sorts of beaten and bruised all her life, but  _who the fuck_   _knew_ that a clumsy swollen heart could feel this good, or this full of love.

Her tiny mouth gurgles as Regina swipes the tears from Sola’s plump little cheeks with an affectionate thumb.

“Wouldn’t want to miss out on a deal, double-deal.  I’ll talk to Montoya.”  Emma strolls over and hunkers down next to the armchair.  “Hey, baby girl.”

“No.  You  **tell** her to talk, and tell her to stop pussyfooting around for chrissake.  This isn’t politics.  Isn’t that right, chula?”  Her mistrust is still there, that betrayal, and a pinch of that old rivalry; it’s too bad Montoya is the only cop Emma has in her back pocket these days, but Regina knows, she knows that she’s the only one for her.  Holding their baby so tender, her lips loose and her moving, changing smiles that uncomplicated and effortless.  “Hmn, I just remembered.  We’re out of eggs.”

“Sola and I can make a trip tomorrow.  We’ll do laundry too, won’t we, kiddo.“

“I’m sorry, I missed groceries.”

Emma shrugs.  “I like eggs in the morning, but it’s been dead for me.  I can do the groceries, it’s not a problem.  I mean, we have problems, but that’s not one of them, yeah?”

Regina’s eyes soften up again, molasses warm and gooey like they get at her sappiest before folding down for a kiss.  Their baby girl fusses, tiny feet kicking out.  “Oh, I’m bleeding on her onesie."

Heaving a big sigh – because that is so like Regina, to say so little about how she hurts – Emma fetches a towel.  Can’t help fussing some too.  “How bad is it?”

“I’m fine.  Here, take her, let me make a bottle too,” she says, and sweeps out of the room.

Something isn’t sitting right about tonight – it isn’t so romantic like shared hearts or other such nonsense, but it’s obvious there’s something bothering Regina, and it’s bothering Emma.  Before she can even do up the snaps on a clean onesie, the woman is already in her bare feet and an old t-shirt padding her way back in, her suit half off and hanging around her hips, a bottle in hand.

“Let me see,” Emma says, lifting the bottom of the t-shirt, revealing an open gash.  “Geez.  Go stitch that up.”

“It’s superficial.  I’ll do it later.”  

“Regina, look at me.  She’s right here, I have her,” she insists, frustrated and a bit gruff as she hoists their girl up in rough motions.

That’s all it takes.  Her anxieties blooming out all over her face, Regina grips Emma’s forearm, squeezes hard, and breathes and breathes for a tense moment.  It’s a sucker punch.  

“Shit, babe.  We’re not them.”  It’s a small reminder, but it whistles out on a sharp puff of air; she can be trusted.  

“I know.”  Regina passes the bottle and walks off to the kitchen for the first aid kit.

Emma follows her out and observes from the partial hall for a bit.  Moonlight slants in.  Regina pulls a stool over and sits in the pale streak slicing the breakfast bar.  They don’t turn on lights.  It’s a bad habit from when they were both brooding lone-wolfs.  Their one exception: the soft night light in their toddler’s room that splatters like stars up above.  Their baby girl likes it.

 

–

 

“She’s asleep,” Emma says, before anything else.  Regina only nods, sullenly peering out their vast bedroom windows, tip of her nose bobbing oddly close to the glass, like someone stuck.  

Silence is easier.  So, she dumps her belt, strips out of her Batsuit and picks up one her rumpled t-shirts from the floor.  Stretching into it, she fumbles across their bed to sit on the edge by the windows.  

Emma tries again after a minute.  “I’m sorry.  And it’s not stupid.”

“No.  But, it is …”  Regina turns, touching her tongue to her top teeth as she hesitates, her thoughts like a pile-up on the freeway colliding on their way up her throat.  “It’s just that, looking out, I see Gotham – I can name the streets, the East End, the whole north side, the bodegas I used to – the people – the fastest routes, the safest routes, and –”  Regina’s breathing hard, her stomach fluttering as she fights through one more explanation, one more rationalization.  “Emma, I see these people breaking their backs to wake up one more day, one more day, always one more day wishing for a way out of this city they won’t ever … and I can’t …”

“Then don’t,” Emma says and stretches, really stretches an arm for her.  

“I’m not a superhero.”  Regina holds on, and allows herself to be reeled back in between long naked thighs, strong and familiar in the dimness.  “I did it for you.  Back then.  I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Is it about Sola?”  The probe is light but loaded.  Gazing up at Regina, head flopped so far back, it’s like religion.  The fact that she trembles however, that her madonna trembles – Emma doesn’t need full disclosure.  

Slowly, she places both her open hands on Regina’s scratched-up waist, rucks up over-washed cotton with her nose, and presses her mouth to Regina’s stomach.  She smells like antiseptic.  Emma unzips the bottom half of the Catsuit and tugs the tight material off.

Quietly into bed, they spread out on their backs and as the sheet floats over them, Regina shuffles in closer.  

Something about the ceiling feels closer than ever, too close for comfort.  Home at last, in the dark, Emma thinks about a fresh start in a big house, the East coast, a small town even, some easier time and place.

“I know we shouldn’t have kept her.”  Regina is so quiet.  “I know you didn’t want to, at first.  So, I worry sometimes.”

Plopping her cheek to her pillow, she murmurs back, “I didn’t, but you did … that’s it.”

“I don’t want her to be an accident.  Or a compromise.”

“She’s not.”  Fingers reaching out, she applies a smidge of pressure on her chin.  Regina’s face tips down –  _and geezus fuck_  – she’s like the moon, her full face, like the full moon.  “You’re not.”

Mouth apart, Regina crimps her brows tight together for a measure of control.  Her first tear is round and immeasurable.  

“Maybe we should make it official, adopt her.”  It really isn’t fair to bring it up like she is, but she isn’t about to wake up months later to discover that Regina has taken their little girl and run off because she thinks Emma is that much likelier to run off.  

Still, her proposal is sincere if not one hundred percent serious.  Emma doesn’t wait for an answer, doesn’t want one – she’d rather just kiss her.  

Regina sucks in a breath after a while, the gash causing her some pain now that the adrenaline is gone.  Stiffly, she settles on her back again.  Faint, restless noises of their little girl in her crib transmit through a baby monitor.  The door to their bedroom is left wide open.

Quick, a siren blares and passes outside their building.

“I don’t actually think I killed them.”

Rolling in, Emma says, “Okay.”  The thin sheet billows as she sneaks her arm underneath and places her hand over top the bandage stuck to Regina’s stomach.    

It’s the one thing she kept of her first foster mom, a little superstition:  _cuts and scrapes heal better if a loved one’s hand stays over them._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's call this a pilot is why i started with episode zero, lol


	2. Chapter 2

 

_Previously on[Episode Zero](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12580592/chapters/28655112)_

_Opening titles.  The blues.  Black and white streets.  Broken glass.  Cop cars flashing sirens speeding up the block.  The clang of the city.  Steam rushing out of a subway grate.  A teetering train rattles on an elevated sky track, the faces in the windows apathetic, oblivious.  From up across several rooftops, Batman looks out high powered binoculars.  Catwoman stands right behind, left arm slung over Batman’s shoulder, chin resting on the other one.  The sky twinkles._

 

_Episode One: Isn’t That How It Happens?_

 

 

Regina likes to plan.  From her first blink out of sleep, it’s about making choices.

One morning, two weeks after turning 39, Regina brings up kids over breakfast.  It’s a short conversation: she doesn’t want them, she still doesn’t, but she wanted to ask one last time.  

“I don’t think about it much, actually.”

“Think about it now,” she asks, standing up against the breakfast bar opposite a hungrily eating Emma for a bit of support, hands folded around a hot cup.

“I don’t think we’re the kind of people that should have kids.”

Her black coffee reflects a series of brilliant spots on its surface, wobbly and luminescent white from the sunlight bouncing into their modern open apartment.  "Exactly.  So …“  Regina looks wistfully out at their home: spacious, comfortable for two.  “Do you want kids?”

Hunched over the breakfast bar, she simply smiles and shakes her head, already casually back to swiping her toast through the runny eggs on her plate.

 

–

 

“Listen to me, I’m not taking them.  Find me something else.”  

Off a frazzled huff, Emma hefts her little girl up higher on that sore hip – it twinges, but compared to the stress in Sola’s face, hot pink and feverish, as she clutches to the shoulder of Emma’s jean jacket and cries and cries and cries – “Oh, baby girl,” Emma mumbles, kissing her forehead, barely listening to the prattle on the phone crushed to her ear.

“I told you, Chuck.  No more out of town cases.”  Bending down, she scowls at the rows and rows of colorful boxes inked with assorted overblown promises of making it all better – “Fine, all right, small time, I don’t care.  I can’t – no, I can’t talk.”

Phone stuffed in her back pocket once more, Emma immediately opens her palm across her girl’s downy dark head, thumb stroking rhythmically, reflexively after all those years learning the motion; it’s Regina and her reading glasses, it’s sweatpants and a fresh t-shirt, it’s boring evenings on the couch in between work and The Work, basic and casual; small, pea-sized amounts of affection; a thumb here, a thumb there.

“Excuse me.  Swan?  Emma Swan?”

Enigmatic as ever, hands buried in her usual trenchcoat – Emma is speechless as she straightens to see –

**Tamara Holmes: hard-boiled journalist, believer in big ideals, Neal’s ex, foolhardy fling.**

“Hi,” Emma says, slouching back further into the crass everyday personality she employs out and about in Gotham.  “I thought you moved to Metropolis.”

“I’m back.”  Tamara chuckles.  Moving in close and personal, she tips a tall box off the shelf and offers it like an olive branch, but like, for future reference.  “How long’s it been?  Shit, I can’t believe you had a kid.”

“I didn’t.  Babysitting for a friend.  Extra cash.  You know.”

“I do.  You still on your own?  You have somebody?”  Back-to-back questions; it’s been her tell since that first night huddled next to the hot dog cart on 5th, heartily asking all the questions because Neal had been too cowardly to talk, both cheeks stuffed full of chili cheese.  Over the years, Tamara has had her suspicions, has had her hotly pursued agendas tailing supers, too tunnel-visioned to truly have anybody’s back.  Now, it’s obvious this running smack into each other is no accident.

Her little Sola squalls and Emma’s stomach knots up in sharp spasms.  In spite of it, she manages to keep her face lukewarm and focused on Tamara as she answers, “No.  Just me.  Thanks for the help.”

 

–

 

Regina clings to a handful of her own shirt, hugging herself with one arm, and like a small boat adrift on a cold lake, she stands smack in the middle of her corner office and listens to Emma sweat details about symptoms and the internet and being mistrustful of medications while their poor baby wails and wails into the phone.  Her stomach sours.  

“Do you need me to come home?  I’ll come home.”  

Hearing that, Emma hastily backpedals.  Fact is, they barely made their mortgages this month between trial running pricey child care and overhauling security equipment for the apartment without having to hard dip into their investments.  Regina is in and out of the office too sporadically as it is; Emma hasn’t been working much, if at all.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Regina turns the best memories of her Papi inside out for their little Sola, lists a bunch of basic instructions, and tells them, “I’m here, I’m here, I love you, and I’m here.”

Emma calls two more times to update her through the afternoon.  Two o’clock rolls around and she sits in her office checking the clock, checking the clock for another ten minutes, before ultimately throwing a pile of development reports at a senior director and a deadline of two days at the team and takes off, a whirl of panicked testers in her wake.

There’s traffic, a bad crash on a major road ahead of a bridge out of downtown.  Regina rubs at her temple and sighs, really sighs, because she can’t actually fly like those make-believe superheroes.  

It takes more than an hour but she makes it in their front door to find Emma on the sofa in the middle of zipping a spoon in the air at a much calmer Sola.  Discarding all her things on the floor, Regina makes a beeline for the woeful explosion of tissues and soft toys and sippy cups, and sits across from them on the coffee table.  

“Oh, sweetheart,” she aches, skimming a finger down Sola’s cheek, ruddy and chapped from all the tears.

Sheepish, Emma says, “Sorry I freaked out.  I didn’t know what to do.”  Stuttering her way back out of an anxious breath in, a precarious red blob quivers on the spoon she’s holding, and she has reasons to be insecure but she needn’t be because she cares, Emma cares so much and it translates.  

Still, these things take time; foolish and generous as her heart is, Emma isn’t much into believing in things.

Reaching for her, Regina pulls on the round neck of Emma’s t-shirt for a quick kiss.  “You don’t think I would’ve called you?”  

Emma tips in for one more quick one.  “She’s better, but she’s still kinda hot.”

“I’m here.  I’m home,” Regina says, and they take a small moment for themselves, to slow down and smile for each other.

“There’s a cloth by her bunny over there.”

Regina touches the damp cloth up and down their toddler’s arm while spoonfuls of bright jello loop to her tiny mouth, and it reminds her of those swooping cartoon superheroes they sometimes watch on the weekends.  It’s natural, and it feels right, and in the most unexpected ways for them.

Her first love used to talk about having kids with her a lot, talk about making something important with their love, holding her so surely in bed on the afternoons she was able to sneak off to see him.  She hasn’t told Emma that.  But, sometimes when she sees that endearing face stuck looking so glum and downright confused by how accepting she’s been about becoming a mom - and in such a snap too - and she thinks that maybe she could.  Or should.

 

–

 

_Clinkclink!  Clink!  Clunk!_

Laid out flat on her back on the sofa, Regina listens to the clamorous fooling around behind her in the kitchen and smiles, nibbles her bottom lip because of course Emma’s cooking greasy and garlicky tonight; she’ll be lucky to have anything remotely fibrous or green.  Sola snuffles, itty bitty fist punching out drowsily as she sleeps on her tummy, pleasantly heavy on top of Regina’s empty stomach.

Her thumb makes circles, smoothing puckers in the cotton of a robot print onesie and her little Sola settles; the whole of her miniature red heart and lungs in the palm of her Mami’s hand.

“Do you want a beer too?”

“Emma.  When do I ever?”

Moseying over, Emma looms above her and snorts, “How are you gonna eat like that?”  Taking a swig from her beer first, she plunks the bottle down next to Sola’s sippy cup and settles on the floor, balancing a large plate on top her crossed legs.  “Mushroom melts.  Havarti, goat cheese, three kinds of mushrooms, and yes, I used the ugly wild ones.  Plus, I caramelized the onions.  Made it fancy.  Just for you.”

“Nothing green?”

“The beer’s green.  But you didn’t want one.”

“The bottle is green.”

Smirking, Emma lifts the plate to Regina’s eye level.  “They have arugula in them.  See?”

It’s oddly romantic and kind of feels like a date.  “Hold my hand,” Regina says.

Meeting her halfway, Emma squeezes a little love out of her fingers and sticks one half of a sandwich at her.  Regina bites the sharp corner off.  Crumbs all over and she doesn’t care.  Smudges of goat cheese off her lip and she doesn’t care.  For a precious while, the two of them eat in the peace and quiet, too tired, too comfortable to talk.

Eventually, the bat signal shoots up, bursts the clouds in the skies for the second time since the sun has gone down.  “Montoya really wants to talk to you.  Must have something to say.  For once.”

Emma shrugs and scratches at the nape of her neck, messy ponytail bouncing as she thinks and thinks.  On some other night it might be lovable on her, but so much has been in such a tizzy of late.

“What,” Regina says, and her tongue is thick and dry from the salty bread.  “Emma, what is it?”

“I ran into Tamara today, the reporter –”

“I  **know** who she is.”  

“Well, actually, she ran into me and Sola at the drugstore, and I didn’t tell her about us, but she’s back in town, and old friends or not, she’s …” Emma’s tongue clicks, “I think she’s tracking me.”

Regina scoffs.  “She is not a friend.”

“It’s a problem, but I mean, she has no idea.  She thinks I’m an insider, but that’s about it.”

“I don’t like her.”  Regina adjusts Sola off her sternum so she can breathe a little fuller.  

“You don’t like anybody,” Emma teases.

“Well, you sleep with everybody,” she snips, her softest fingers combing through Sola’s tangled locks.  It’s like this: she doesn’t look like either of them, but her hair is like the night sky shooting out in soft wisps, and her profound little eyes are honeyed, and her bouncy fine skin has been loved by the golden sun like hers.  And so, it isn’t remotely fair, but it makes her feel at times that much closer to their little girl, like she could easily hide from Emma in their little girl, and that scares her.

“Okay,” Emma huffs out, brushing her fingers off, the crumbs hitting the plate in a soft patter.  

Regina frowns through the salt sting in her nose.  It isn’t about exes (though she’s not so sure that it isn’t about options either).

“Here’s the thing.  Tamara was a foster kid like me for a while.  Her grandmother’s from Metropolis, found her eventually and took her in, loved her.  She left Gotham a few years back because her grandmother was sick.  I don’t trust her, but she told me once she does the shit that she does because of her grandmother, and I believe her about that.  Can’t exactly blame people for not trusting us costumed types.”  

"I thought it was a fling,” Regina says, flatly.

Emma leans forward, slants her head to better match hers.  “Regina, it was.  People just like telling me stories in bed.  That’s all it was.”

Regina flushes, hot and embarrassed, because she’s told stories naked next to Emma like that, and she shouldn’t have assumed it could be special to their relationship.  "Am I supposed to  **not** be jealous now?”

“You can be jealous, but that’s not why I’m telling you.  I’m telling you so we can be safe.”

“We don’t tell each other everything.”

“Yeah, but isn’t the point that we could?  You don’t like surprises.  So, no surprises.”  Setting the plate aside, Emma scootches right up against the sofa on her hands and knees.  “Regina, I don’t tell stories.  But I told them to you.”

She isn’t proud of feeling like she’s in this more than Emma is, but she’s also had to chase their trying love for so many damn years across rooftops and back alleys, in and out of personal scruples and failings and falling-outs – more than four years of tumultuous trial by error, plus nearly six years of having their act together, and still she forgets sometimes that theirs is an equal love.  Regina sighs, swiping crumbs and grease from the corner of Emma’s mouth; she makes messes, but she cleans them up, the idiot.  “Kiss me, please.”

Emma kisses her, unbelievably sweetly, making sure to linger around her upper lip like she likes between each shallow press in.  Regina nearly rolls their baby right off of herself itching for more.     

“Fuck, sorry, little one,” Emma laughs in light snorts as she pushes Sola's diapered bottom back up.  

Regina is so damn in love with her sometimes, and sometimes it’s the stupidest things that bring it out of her.

“You’ve looked after her all day.  I’ll stay in with her,” she offers, fingers pinching the front of Emma’s t-shirt, reluctant despite her words.  “Go, stretch your legs, run around Gotham.  Save the people.”

“Nah, Sola’s sick.  Let’s stay in together, yeah?  Get cozy in bed, Netflix, a bowl of popcorn?  Our baby girl snuggled between us.”  

“Montoya’s been flashing that stupid thing all night.”

“I don’t care,” Emma swears up and down, on repeat, again and again and again, right against her mouth.

Regina snorts, extending an arm between them.  “You smell like garlic and onions.”

“So do you,” she laughs back.  Picking up the plate, she shoves the big remaining hunk of mushroom melt in her mouth and stalks off for the kitchen.  “I’ll do the dishes if you brush your teeth.”  

“I’ll do you if you brush yours,” Regina tosses up over the arm of the sofa.

_Knockknockknock!  Knockknockknockknock!_

The tap cuts out.  Emma’s feet plod lazily across the floor and the front door unbolts.  Hauling herself up to a sitting position, Regina resettles their sick little baby in the slope of her neck, stretches for Emma’s beer and takes a couple gulps.

Getting up on her feet, she sees Emma still chatting in muffled tones, arms braced against the threshold of their apartment.  Regina pads closer, hanging on to the beer.  “Who is it?”

The fluorescents out in the hall blur their entryway in a bleached-out brightness, but she hears –  _That was me!_  – and she’s suddenly very sure that he’s a very young boy here to deliver some very bad news.  

Emma is mute.

_My name is Henry.  I’m your son._

 

–

 

The skies grumble.  In the alley alone, the cut of her silhouette brittle and angular, Regina numbly scoops up a tiny baby girl from a pile of cardboard boxes – the rain pelting the fire escapes, the garbage cans and her shoulders hard, the beat of the city loud and ill-tempered on this particular night – and it’s an easy choice. 

This isn’t the way she pictured bringing home a baby.  In fact, she hasn’t pictured children in three years.

Making two puddles in the kitchen, Regina blinks and blinks as she holds her breath for Emma to stroll out of their bedroom.  Emma is mid-sentence, in her sports bra pulling her other arm out of her Batsuit.  Regina breathes and breathes at the shocked, open mouth confusion on her face.

“I picked her up in an alley, and –”

Emma rushes off and reappears with an armful of towels and a stiff, fearful expression.  Frantically, she strips the baby girl over a towel on the kitchen table.

“She looks about six months old,” Regina says, observing them nervously.  

Left by a dumpster beside a bodega in a box full of scrunched up newspapers printed in Chinese, the baby was meant to be found, she thinks.  They should take her to the hospital, have them contact child protective services, but neither makes a move to do what really is supposed be the right thing in these circumstances.

“Put these in the dryer and we can put them back on to warm her up.”

One month later, Regina picks out a crib and a name for her.

 

–

 

“Are you mad?”  Emma asks, putting the pressed apple juice back in the fridge.

“Very,” Regina says, bouncing absently behind the kitchen island as their toddler fusses in her tired arms.  The boy is munching on a plain grilled cheese in front of the television, broad round face illuminated by the flashing colours on the screen.  He marginally resembles Emma.  If she squints.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”  Emma shuffles up beside her, fists stuffed under her crossed arms.  “He could be … conning us.”

“I highly doubt that.”  Her tone is hard and distant and it pricks Emma like she means it to.  Guilt clogs her throat.

The bat signal flickers across the skies for a third time.  The boy springs up from the coffee table and slaps two greasy child hands to the pristine glass of their gigantic balcony windows.

Regina knits her brows, thinking twice about needing to pick a fight.  “You should go,” she says faintly with a terse point of her chin out at Gotham.

“I’ll set him up on the couch first.”  Hesitant about touching her, Emma tugs the loose fabric at her elbow, and adds, “He isn’t the reason I didn’t wanna have kids, okay?”

This isn’t a choice; Regina didn’t think she would have to open out their love like this, to have to include other people like this; have a life that unwieldy; a life of much too much, of relationships and attachments and soft spots.  Dumbfounded, she tightly closes her stinging eyes.

_Sometimes life happens first, and the choice is what’s next?_

“Emma,” she calls out, and her ponytail swishes as she turns back, holding an expectant gust in her lungs and salt water in her eyes, “and I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t want them.”

Sola clumsily slaps a sticky fist around and whines and whines for her attention.  “Chula, Mami’s talking,” Regina says, fishing the tiny fist from out of her flustered face.  Emma glowers at the stack of dishes on the rack above the sink, begrudging how easily preoccupied she is by their baby girl.

“Emma, please,“ she attempts again, hoists Sola up higher.  "I’m not upset about him.  Per se.  Or rather, I mean that if he is who he claims he is … then, he’s ours.  But, that doesn’t mean I understand how this happened,” she says, chomping her frustration out on the syllables.  “I wasn’t lying.  I thought – at one point in my life, I thought I would be a mom and have a hoard of children running around because he loved me, and we made love, and that’s how it’s supposed to happen, but Emma, if this is the way it happens to us –” 

“I really don’t wanna hear about him right now, okay?”  Emma throws up a tense open hand between them and has to swallow thickly on the bitter pill coming up her throat listening to Regina talk about him; in poor phrasing, she can admit, but it’s out, it’s out of her own cinched throat.  

“Will you let me – finish –”

“– He was your first, he died, I’m sorry, I am.  Really.  But he doesn’t get a say here, Regina, because what you mean to say is that you just didn’t wanna have kids  **with me**.”

“No,” she protests, “that is not what I mean.  Not even remotely.  Emma, you and I kept her because with you it felt like love.  We  **both** chose her, that’s what you told me –”

“– it was supposed to be  **you** and  **me** –”

“– out of actual love, and not a guarantee –”

“You look at her like you look at me!”  Emma shouts by mistake.  Immediately, she scrubs her face of the red rough emotion there, steadying herself with both hands at her hips before saying softly, “Which means you were lying.  Maybe not to me, but at the very least, to yourself, and I didn’t know.”

The boy stands there and gawks anxiously up at them, big front teeth poking out, picking at the hem of his faded blue zip-up.  Without another word, Emma makes up the sofa in fresh linens and a thick knitted blanket.  Calmly, she shuts herself in their bedroom then, presumably to put her suit on and hop out their bedroom balcony.

Regina plucks a bottle out of the warm pot on the stove, pads over to the sofa and sits next to the boy.  He carefully opens up the folded blanket and kindly lays it out over both their laps.  Together they watch an old cartoon on the television:  _The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes._


	3. Chapter 3

 

_Previously on[Episode One](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12580592/chapters/28656280)_

_Opening titles.  Moody bass and trumpet.  Empty streets.  Steep buildings.  Nighttime black on black.  Rain patters the car lined block.  Shapes of people living their lives in the spattering of dirty lit windows up the rundown apartments.  Clattering metal.  Gun shots.  Shapes in the dark.  Smoke billows from a stack.  The outline of a cape fluttering past as a mangy stray dog barks after it.  The very back of an alley.  In the foreground, two bodies.  Dead._

 

_Episode Two: When What I Will Is What I Won’t_

 

Hard, blue light slashes into the lived-in bedroom from out of the partly closed door, evidence of habitation in the textured shades of black.   _Flikk!_  It cuts out, and out she tiptoes from inside their chilly bathroom.  Extra careful as she slips between the sheets, Emma pokes a hard elbow to her pillows and peers over at the slumped form on the bed, slowly rubs her back.  Regina rarely sleeps on her stomach; the sheet is rumpled around her waist, her arms are out and one of them has fallen off the mattress.

“You’re home,” she mumbles, half-asleep, and sniffles.

“Feeling better?”

Regina makes a soft noise, barely a vibration out of her throat.  The tip of her nose is florid from the cold she caught from the kids.  Emma brushes aside some thick strokes of hair and runs the back of her fingers down her twisted neck: clammy still and running a low temperature.  Equally carefully, she places a kiss on Regina’s cheek, then stretches over to retrieve that dangling arm and settles in close, but not too close; leaves room for the harder apologies that still need to be made.

“Emma.  You’re going to get sick.”

“Whatever.  Kids give you trouble?”

“It was fine,” Regina says, but it sounds tight and unhappy in the 3AM bleakness.  “How was it?”

“Petty crime, mostly.“  Except truth is, she should’ve been investigating for links between the flux of crack on the streets and a series of murders in the East End, but listless all night, thinking about the mess back home, about how she could avoid it forever, about her secrets like a cluttered drawer, and about how the hell she is supposed to accommodate him in their two bedroom loft, she got nothing done.  

Frankly, her priorities feel a joke these days.  But then again, the disposition of vigilante for her never did spring from the same place as her predecessors.

–

Regina is rubbing her nose up against Emma’s throat, her small frame swallowed in the covers, adjusting and readjusting miserably when the next morning brightens into a soft focus.  Emma nudges up on the slant of Regina’s chin.  "What’s wrong?  You okay?”

Her brows are furrowed but she nods.  First things first, Emma checks her temperature.  Next thing she knows, Regina is peeling that hand off her forehead and pushing it beneath the band of those flimsy pyjama shorts.

Their baby girl is blubbing into the monitor but they know her whiny cries from the important ones and disregard them for time being.  It’s been too long for them.  Love changes, and the sex changes, but it still feels like them if a bit matter-of-fact.  It’s just, Regina woke up wet.  They’ve also been badly mismatched, a little bent out of shape lately, but figuring that sort of stuff out is typically, for them, easier after sex so there’s that too.  Emma rolls over, inelegantly opening out Regina’s thigh, hot and bulging the sheet —

– it’s too bad they have kids now –

“I can’t make her stop!  She cries a lot, Emma.  I think she wants something?”

“Holy shit, kid!”  Emma shouts and fumbles for the stupid sheet, her surprise exploding in her throat.

Henry blinks at them and it’s so hard to tell what he has or hasn’t seen.  “Don’t you ever take out your ponytail, Emma?”

“What?  No, I don’t sleep with it up, I –” she huffs, like a hard reset.  “Okay, kid.  Get out.”  

He doesn’t move.  Blunt nails tickle at her side, but it’s only Regina trying her best to tactfully scrabble down her rucked up tee.  

“Please,” Emma adds.

His front teeth stick it to his bottom lip as he swallows hard and turns back out.  Regina pushes a breath out and slaps a hand over her eyes, mad and embarrassed and who knows what else.

“Geez.  We’re gonna have to lock every fricking door every time now.  Like, this kid, am I right?”  

“He stomps around the apartment, like you.”

Emma brings her eyes up to the opposite wall of their room and tracks the small boyish clomps.

“Talk to him,” Regina says, the frustration in her punching the consonants out.

“I will.  When I’m back.”

“No, Emma.  Right now.  He barges in and out of rooms because he’s looking for you all the time,” she lectures irritably.  It’s a bit rough; they both roll their heavy heads in at the same time to check in with one another; the momentum of their relationship; both still here, right next to each other.  Regina splays her hand out over the knoll of Emma’s rib cage and sighing out her nose, she helps hold Emma’s heart and lungs in, stamping two kisses to the cotton of her t-shirt.  “Stop avoiding him.  Let him find you.  The apartment is not as big as you are trying to make it be.”  

“Yeah, okay, but then what?  Like, seriously, compare freckles, talk medical histories, tell our life stories?  Or, hey!  I could always interrogate his methods and maybe he’s got the wrong person.”

Regina pushes herself up, shoves the thin straps of her pyjama top back over her shoulders, the silk fluttering at her stomach as she stands and pulls back on those matching shorts, crisp and efficient. “You’re the Batman, aren’t you?  Figure it out.”

“It’s just Batman.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, rounding the front of their bed, a lullaby for their little girl already between her lips.

Square jaw and hapless, Emma stuffs her legs into a pair of sweatpants from the small pile of dirty clothes that she keeps by her bottom corner of the bed, and squeezes the stiff muscle of her shoulder as she thinks up some options.  Begrudgingly, she plods out on her own.

It’s no surprise the kid is hunkered behind a box of Cap'n Crunch at the furthest seat of the large kitchen table, scooping spoon after spoon of spilling milk and cereal into his clumsy mouth.  Now and then, Emma thinks the two of them are more similar than not.  But, then she wonders whether similarities actually exist, or whether people simply make shit up for their own sakes and spoils the magic for herself.

“How’s the cereal,” Emma asks.  He nods but doesn’t stop his chomping and she brews the coffee.  He’s on his second bowl by the time she sits on the cross angle from him, lays her forearms on the chunky walnut tabletop and tucks her fingers in.  Ready for a fight.

“Next time, knock.  Okay?”  

He keeps to the cereal, head down, hovering close to the bowl.    

“Henry, I’m sorry we haven’t figured out much here, it’s been … it’s been busy around here,“ she continues and stretches for the cereal box.  Cap'n Crunch rattles out on the table and she pushes the individual bits around.  “But, I thought maybe we could talk a bit.  Right now, if you want?”  

Henry slurps at his milk.  “If Sola is Regina’s baby, then what happened to Sola’s dad?  Where is he?”  

“That’s not …“  Emma frowns.  "Sola’s  **our** baby.”  

“But she doesn’t look like you.”  

“That doesn’t matter, kid.  That’s not what makes a family.“  

He frowns back at her, the pronounced scrunch of his nose a lot like Regina’s.  It’s odd.  “Then, what happened to  **my** dad?”

“He, uhm …” it’s like the kid has a prepared list.  “He wasn’t really ever a part of the equation.  So, I don’t actually know where he is.  He’s living his life.”

“Don’t you think you should find out?”

“No.  It wouldn’t change anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.  It’s Regina, and it will always be Regina for me,” she reiterates, as if she’s teaching one plus one.

“Like, your true love?”

“I mean, yeah.  If you want to put it that way,” she says, positive her face must be contorting like crazy trying to wrap her head around his way of thinking.

His bottom lip protrudes, but it’s not a pout, and it’s again a lot like something Regina does; if ever she’s feeling something she doesn’t appreciate running amok her expressive face, she points her mouth too, sort of like him.  It’s also possible she’s projecting.  To tie him to Regina, help the guilt.  “Did you, want to find him?” she asks, her halting cadence not doing much to disguise her strong distaste for her (twice) ex-boyfriend intruding on their lives.

“Does he know he’s my dad?”

“Well, no, he and I broke up before I found out about you, but here’s the thing, I don’t think that makes him your dad.  The same way I’m not really your mom.  I think being a parent has to be earned, you know?”  He’s an open face and yet milky-opaque and difficult to read for ten years old.  “I wouldn’t call the people who left me on the side of a highway my parents, for example.”

“Then, no,” he says, and dredges for the few soggy pieces still floating in his milk.

It’s too much to unpack at once.  Instead, she tosses a few squares of Cap’n Crunch into her mouth and stares down at the bits left behind.  Her overloaded chest churns, frothing and foaming her own unresolved issues.  "It probably doesn’t mean much, I mean especially after all these years, and it shouldn’t, but I thought about you a lot at first.  I thought about all the things I couldn’t give you, and I just, I had to stop because it got too hard, uhm, thinking about not knowing you.  Making up a pretend life for you.  So, I stopped.”  Emma peeks up at him from beneath her lashes and sees only curious eyes, bright and disorienting.  "Do you understand?  Now, here you are.  Right across from me and …” her head projects flashes of her own imagined birth parents sitting in his same position.  Tongue tied, she muddily ends, “It’s just a lot of time has passed.”

“I didn’t stop,” he says.  

Her throat is sticky with processed sugar, and she softly clears her throat.  “Right.“    

 _How did she become her birth parents?  How did she become their same mistakes?_   Behind her, Regina sneezes, blows her nose as she strolls out from the partial hall and past the metal bars of the stairs built into the middle of their apartment.    

“There’s no toilet paper in our bathroom, Emma,” she announces, low and nasal.  

Emma snorts, and smiles as she says, “There’s coffee.”  

Off a disinterested hum, Regina shuts the door to the main bathroom and sneezes some more.  

“If you’re not my mom, Emma,” he squeaks, and that gets her attention.  “Are we family?“  He looks straight at her; the boy has guts.  

Emma gulps.  “I’m your birth mother.  If your site is right.”  

“It’s right.”

“Right,” she sighs.

He thinks for a moment.  “Can I come with you?  On your job?”

“No,” Emma says, firmly, the chords in her throat bulging disturbingly against her skin.  “Look, kid.  Maybe you think you don’t like Regina, but it’s not okay to keep treating her like she doesn’t live here.  Regina and I are together, and it’s a permanent thing.  This is her home, too.  So, she’s the one when I’m not around.  Got it?”    

“How long are you going to be gone?“  

“It could be a week, it could be two.  I’m not sure, Henry.”  He just nods, like usual.  Emma flips her legs over the dining bench and pushes herself up; leaves her coffee.  “Don’t forget to put the milk back as soon as you’re done, yeah?“

It makes her feel lousy, but she needs a break from him.  Backing off to the main bathroom, she taps faintly on the closed door.  Looking over, finding herself still totally in plain view of the kid, Emma squishes out a tight smile for him then taps again.  “Regina,” she says, in a strained, super secret inside voice, “Regina, it’s me.”  Leaning an ear in she hears a tinkle and tries the knob.  “Regina?”

“Oh, for fuck sakes, Emma.”  The toilet flushes, and in a flash she’s yanked in like a flap of fabric, like a well-timed routine.  The lock clacks back in place, and the safety she feels, it’s shitty.

Regina turns on the faucet, rubs the soap in well, really works the suds into every crease of her skin.  

“Hear anything?“ Emma asks.  

“Not really,” she admits.    

Blowing out her cheeks, Emma straggles up close and places her chin tiredly on Regina’s shoulder, missing the neediness of their early relationship all of a sudden.  Heavily, she brushes both hands over Regina’s hips, over and around the exact roundness of them, and tells her, “We talked about you, a little.  About us.“  Feeling her respond, she prompts her to turn, bumps the sink.  

"He thinks I’m keeping his family apart, doesn’t he?”  Pensively, Regina scratches her index finger in loops through the fine blonde hairs at the nape of Emma’s neck.  "The villain.“  

Outside, the kid makes a racket in the kitchen.  Emma thumbs the gold band hanging like a pendant from Regina’s neck.  "He’s a kid.  We know it isn’t like that, right?”    

Sniffling a bit, Regina slips her finger lower, locates the matching band beneath Emma’s tee.  "We do.“  

“I thought you told me he was fine that first night?”

“Because you yelled at me, Emma, and he felt bad for me.”

Her eyeline drops, to the thin strap of that pyjama top.  “We still have to talk about that.”

“Yes, we do,” Regina says, and straightens from the sink to press their cheeks together.  It’s intimate, but it’s not, not being able to see each other.

“I have time,” Emma says, tenderly to her ear.  “Do you need me to … finish.  Make you come?”

“No.  I’d rather you just hurry back.”

–

There is something different this time.  It’s only been a few hours, and it’s not like she isn’t used to Emma making trips out of town for cases, but it feels like being left behind this time and because of that she can’t concentrate.  Her surface book from the office alerts her to another email; she reads it a couple times, shuffles through the mess of reports on the kitchen table, rigidly jots down her thinking in a small sparse scrawl.  

“What’s up there?”

Regina looks up over her reading glasses, tired and a little loopy, and it takes her a moment to actually twist in her chair and locate the small voice, slightly over her shoulder to her left.  Henry is two steps up on the stairs, head back and hoping to see through the titanium bottom of the open loft up above him, screwing up his eyes like he has x-ray vision.

“It’s an office,” Regina says.  

“How come you’re down here?”

Regina blinks “… it’s too stuffy up there.”  But the boy is smart and isn’t so sure.  It reminds her of Emma’s silly super power.

Her phone chimes:   _Made it.  At a diner.  Best pies_

Her lungs tighten.

“Can we watch The Avengers?”  Regina turns; he’s right beside to her now, smiles up at her for the first time, honest and hesitant, and she maybe misses Emma so specifically in that moment that she nods, takes off her glasses and tries.

He collects the thick knitted blanket from under the open end table where they’ve been keeping a pillow, some linens and his backpack, and it spills out of his arms to the sofa as he hops up beside her.  Regina loudly sneezes, and between a tissue to her nose and multiple remotes she loads up the Netflix.  He pulls open the blanket and it surprises her how easy it can be to feel familiar about it all; like a recognition from a parallel life.

In measured motions, she tucks her legs up on the sofa, settles back, and studies his funny expressions as he takes the remote from her and scrolls down the list of episodes on the television.  “You really like superheroes?”  

“Don’t you?  It’s how I learned.  To be good,” he elaborates on his own and clicks on an episode titled:  _Some Assembly Required_.

His mop of hair is in his eyes, but she crosses her arms; she is not his mom.  “Sola likes them too.”

–

Regina wakes up on the sofa hours later, head on a cushion, blanket up over the point of her shoulder.  Stiffly, she opens out onto her back and calls out, “Henry?”  

The kitchen is still.  He’s left the television on.  His peanut butter and jelly crumbs litter the coffee table.

Pulling herself up, she then putters around the apartment, checks her phone, puts the kettle on, makes herself a honey and ginger and lemon.  Moseying into Sola’s room, she’s perfectly timed to watch her little girl in her crib practicing her M’s and EE’s, bouncing on her bottom in a pile of stuffed toys (and maybe she smiles a lot picturing Emma’s boy pushing toy after toy through the slats in a silly kind of effort to keep their anxious toddler calm and cheerful).  

Regina takes Sola out to the kitchen, feeling loose and better finally.  “Henry?”  Expertly, she pulls ingredients from the fridge with only one hand, clings firmly to her baby girl with the other.  “I’m making food for Sola.  Do you still want to eat?  I know you had a sandwich, but peanut butter and jelly isn’t dinner.  Henry?  Would you like to help me …”  

… she’s talking to herself.  

He’s ten, it shouldn’t upset her, but it does.  Out of humour about it all she seeks him out, but room after room – he isn’t there.  Her heart jumps to conclusions.  Plopping Sola to the floor, she bounds up the stairs to the control platform, makes a second round in and out of each room, and double-checks under the bed, in the closet, behind the shower curtain.  

Hot and flustered, she stands in the middle of the apartment and holds her trembling fingers over her eyes.  

Barely remembering a coat for her baby, Regina blows out of the building and flies down the sidewalk, her open black trench flapping behind her.

It takes nineteen minutes, four blocks, and a lot of luck, but she sees him hopping out of the drugstore from across the street and runs.  Her little girl bawls, sticky fingers caught up in Regina’s hair as she shoves out of the commotion of rush hour pedestrian traffic.  “What are you doing?!” Regina spits as she grabs the front of his zip up and squats down to his height all at once, almost topples over.  “Henry!  What happened?  Where is your coat?!” she bombards him with panicked concern.

He’s shaking as much as she is then.  “Rosabelle buys us lemon packets when we’re sick.  I was buying them for you.”

“What are you talking about?”  He’s holding a plastic bag, and inside, beside the two off-brand bags of cheese puffs is a box of cold and flu hot drink.  “Henry, I … I would’ve taken you.  What if you didn’t know your way back?  I thought I lost you.”

His face pinches, tears well, and he makes a break for it, but she snatches the bend of his arm and he shrinks, and she knows, she knows, but she’s too afraid to open her hand.  “Henry, please.  I can’t run after you with Sola like this.”

He tries to rip his arm from her, and she holds on.  “You’re not my mom!”

“I know,” she says.  

“Emma is supposed to be my mom,” he blubbers, and the tears roll out of him.  “It’s supposed to be Emma.”

“Oh.  Honey.”  Regina flings her arm out for him and hugs him close, hangs on to her two kids in the middle of the noise and tumult of Gotham, an eye in a hurricane.

From across the street, Tamara takes shots of them with her camera

–

“Hey, I’m home!”

Quickly, she pulls out the last of the freshly laundered clothes and shuts the dryer.  Toting the basket out, she knocks into the punching bag and almost stubs her toe.  Emma’s collecting plates from a shelf and hears her coming round the kitchen wall.  “I brought home one of those pies,” she says, and it’s such a relief to have her back.

“Is it apple?”  Regina asks, trying to get a hold of herself.

Emma smiles as she picks out some forks.  “It’s still your favourite, right?”

 _Thwack!  Thwapp!_   The television blares and the kids cackle.  “Emma!” Henry shouts and pops up to his knees.  “Is it okay for Sola to have pie, too?”

“Maybe not, kid.  Here, have yours first …”

… and the picture plays out like it should; two kids, a partner, a home, and  _the best_  apple pie; she should be thankful, but she isn’t.  Emma picks up their toddler, pecks her cheek and places her next to Henry on the floor.  Between mouthfuls he excitedly explains to Sola the backstories of the action onscreen.

Things change, and change again, but Regina thinks about how they used to greet each other – a touch and a kiss and she would be on the kitchen counter by now, begging for it – and it feels so much like loss that she isn’t quite sure what she is supposed to do right this instant.

Putting the basket down on the kitchen table first, Regina strides right up next to Emma, takes one of her hands in both of hers and turns her back to the kids, keeping their holding hands out of sight behind the kitchen island.  Everything in it’s place.  “Sixteen days, and five hours, Emma.”

“I’m sorry,” she says and lays the knife back down in the pie tin.  “I made some cash.”

Regina sighs.  “I thought we were superheroes.”

“Superheroes have to eat too.”  Emma’s lip is split, and  _tsk!_  frustrated, Regina brushes a thumb over it.  “He ran.”  

Peering over her shoulder first to check if the kids are still occupied, she touches the most painstaking kind of kiss to the cut.

“How was it here?” Emma asks, hot pink nails stroking through the very ends of Regina’s bent, un-shampooed, weekend hair.

“Better.  He went out on his own to buy me this, in fact,” she says, fetching the box of lemon hot drink from the back counter.  It makes Emma snort out a small chuckle.  “That’s not all.  He’s been buying things with a couple stolen credit cards from the group home.  Small things.  But they’ll track him.”

There is of course the option to let them, have them take him back.  

Emma meets her eyes, and she’s afraid for  **him** , and she’s afraid for  **them** , and it’s a decision Emma isn’t ready to make, that much is obvious, but she makes herself take that next breath and – “I’ll take care of it.”

Regina nods.  Shows her support.

Back to cutting the pie, Emma is tense and heavy-handed.  “Have a bite?”  

Her stomach is queasy but she takes Emma’s forkful in her mouth and smiles as best she can.  Emma notices, and rumples her brow as she bumps their elbows in concern.  So, she smiles some more and simply shakes her head as if it’s all okay.

“I love you, that’s all.”


	4. Chapter 4

 

 _Previously on_[Episode Two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12580592/chapters/28705232)  
  
_Opening titles.  Low brass notes.  Endless buildings.  Hollers.  Rubber soles pound the wet pavement.  Mouths open in shrieks, shouts.  There are lumps that look like bodies huddled in the cold.  Fists in a brawl.  Trash can fires.  Beat up cars rush by.  The bat signal bursts through the smog.  Up the side of an old brick tenement, an ominous figure is crouched on the bulwark.  Bird’s eye view of the neighbourhood and all it’s tiny lives below._

  
  
_Episode Three: Type O  
_

 

“Here, take this one,” she says, matter-of-factly, as she pads from out of the closet and past the bed in a robe, utility belt hoisted up in a lazy clutch.  “I’ve been listening to you complain about the cartridges on that for weeks.”

“Yeah, it’s on my list.”   _Clik! Clik!_   Emma switches belts and stretches out her neck, loud cracks like a series of shots.  Mouth flattened, Regina runs her fingers down that neck after, strokes out the fine eddies of hair that have slipped from the pins.  “They think the crimes are unrelated.  What do you think?”

“Unrelated, my ass,” she replies, brushing her left hand over Emma’s broadened shoulder before straightening at the cape.  It’s a bit of a pointless gesture, but she’s her partner.  Must be something for her to do.

Most nights, she’s the one that stays behind to watch the kids now.  Most nights, she’s too spent from work and those kids to squeeze into a costume and sneak out into the night only to squat on a rooftop bored and at the end of her rope.  But, she doesn’t tell Emma that.  Or the fact that she really doesn’t like to go out by herself anymore.

“I’ll be late tonight.  Happened again.  Triple murder-suicide, Crown Point, the tenements.”

The fast guilt that cramps up her lungs puts a frustrated stitch in her brow; she’s the one that’s been stubborn about not hanging it up these past months, unbelievably stubborn about even the idea, and here she is in a robe and half-asleep from a hot bath, ready to tuck in already while her partner is about to pick up her slack.  Risk herself, alone.

 _Ffwoosh!_   The right-side window glides up.  It’s a brisk night for a patrol.

“I’ll wait up,” Regina says.  Perched on the sill, Emma looks straight at her like she’s breaking all the rules, cowl on and so much more stringent in costume, but the whole thing is so ironic, Regina has to click her tongue  **and** roll her eyes.  “We’ll sleep in, and we’ll watch Saturday cartoons with the kids, and it’s the weekend Batman.  Lighten up.”

“Me?  Lighten up?”

“Yes, you.”  Regina moves in close and tilts her head back, throat stretched out and open.  “Honestly, why is it do you still insist on hopping out the window like that, hmn?”

“Old habits.  You know.”

Their old place had only a cramped double-hung and a fire escape, but it had meant a lot to them, a lot of memories held in the build of that place.  In fact, Emma surprisingly went out of her way to replace the fixed small panes in this bedroom with a set of wide double-hung windows in thick black frames when they first moved in because of that; they’ve both put a lot of effort into making this one more than only another place to hide.

“That argument can’t be your every excuse.  You know.”

“Still the same.  Old habits,” Emma says cheekily, and the smirk and pointy ears make Regina smile in spite of her every (half-assed) effort to keep it to herself.

Pushing up on her tip toes, Regina kisses her, short and fond and for granted, as the night air flaps out the big cape.  “Don’t be a hero.”

When all is said and done, she knows a nod wouldn’t mean much, but still, she wants one — a hop and a leap and she’s gone again into the endless beyond.

—

“No, let Emma sleep.  Bring me your plate.”

“Hang on.  One second.”

Softly, Regina coughs out a bit of laughter then as she looks up from the sink and sees him licking up syrup from his plate.  Not once in her forty-odd years has she licked a dish, and now here she has two people in one home who won’t let her wash a dish without licking it clean first.

“Watch your nose, kid.  Gotta tilt that plate.”  Regina’s head snaps up and she smiles at the dishevelled sweats and tee, one cuff pushed up her calf, cotton bunched at her shoulders; Emma makes sleep look like rolling in trouble.  ”Hard to sleep in when I can smell sausage,” she says, and smiles back at her.

One arm looped about their toddler, casually sat up on the counter like a sack of flour, Regina leans for a kiss, mouth open in mid-air, in mid-pucker.  Hair sticking up, Emma takes her sweet slow time to amble behind the kitchen island, but makes it up to her roving a hand in the small of her back, and then up over her ass as she pecks her.  “I thought ‘sleep in’ was code for …” Emma hums and it puts a tickle in Regina’s cheeks.

“It is.  But your kids, Emma Swan.  They like to eat.”

That gets her a soft smack and the goofiest grin.

“Morning, baby girl.”  Emma nuzzles their noses as she picks up their giggling girl to investigate the pans on the stove together.  Henry chirps about seconds.

Her phone buzzes.  “Do you want me to get that?”  Of course, Regina doesn’t think who it could be.  Emma takes the call, and her tone — stiff and polite — stops her hands, and a knife floats back down with the other dirty dishes at the bottom.  Emma very deliberately mumbles into the phone for the entire short conversation.

“Yeah, okay.  You too.  Regina?  You should take this.”

Regina flicks her soapy fingers in the sink.  “Hello?”

—

Her papi was not a hero.  He was meek and made excuses.  He believed that family is family no matter the costs.  But he tried, so she clung to him because he was the best she could do for most of her life, and she loved him.  That part was real.

Her mother didn’t love him, and she doesn’t know how she could love someone (still love someone) that hated her papi like that.

“Seriously.  Tell her to fuck off.  We don’t need the money.”

Regina throws a fake smile at the scruffy man behind the register and snatches the oversized brown bag from him.  “Emma, don’t be obtuse,” she says, softly and sharply, and pushes out of the bakery into the hustle and bustle.

“Well, then don’t be so stubborn,” Emma shouts.

Regina hates having this argument.  Nine years.  Two months.  One phone call and she feels like a recovering alcoholic.

Hollering into his phone, a shabby bald man crams up behind them on the sidewalk, and rather than make room for him, Emma spins and shoves at him and shouts for him to “step back, buddy.”  He hisses “fuck off, bitch” and scuttles off into the crowd ahead.  Cars honk.  Hot smog chokes the nippy air.  Mumbling about how the neighbourhood has taken a turn, Emma tries to hold Regina’s hand, to hold her close, hang on to her while they make their way home from the hurly-burly, and she’s being protective, Regina knows, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction the way she sighs out “Emma —” and awkwardly stuffs her hand in her coat pocket.

“It’s busy out.  Nobody is looking.”

Regina stiffens, embarrassed and upset that she is.  “I’m not in the mood.”

Emma stops and stamps a boot as she scoffs.  “What?  To hold my hand?”

“To have this conversation,” she hisses and hoofs it up the noisy sidewalk, barely a look back.  Because it makes her feel small and meek and stupid that it matters, still, that it bothers her to be obvious at all, but she doesn’t like the looks or the fact that she has no choice but to endure the leers, like she’s back in skimpy sequins and spinning on a pole.

They hold hands at home; talking about small things, reading reports on the sofa after dinner, sometimes even in bed before sleep comes.

“Regina.  Whoa, hey —” Emma snatches her back from the curb and steadies her with both hands, face scrunched and tentative.

Her ears drum and she stares back, at sea for a brief moment.

“Home is that way.  The car’s that way.”

Feeling a tender squeeze at her elbow, Regina takes in air and takes in the cars over Emma’s shoulder, remembers to breathe out after, but her mother sticks, her mother’s lessons stick – “Don’t let Henry eat all those tarts all at once.”  Raising an eyebrow, she adds “Don’t eat all those tarts all at once, Emma.”

“Have breakfast with us.”

“Emma, I’d rather not,” she says – but then hunching her shoulders in as people bump and scramble past them to cross the street, Regina pulls her hiding hand out and pinches the split of that thin denim Emma’s been so careless lately about braving the bad weather in.  The jacket is so old.  “Did Chuck call?” she asks and rolls a button between her thumb and fingers; it isn’t much, it’s about all she can offer in public, but Emma knows.

“Yeah, they’ll watch ‘em.  Rita will hog Sola in the back office.  Chuck will want to show the kid the business.”  Emma hikes her mouth in a lopsided fondness for the old couple right as a gust blows a mess of blonde over her face.  “They think we’re trying out fostering.  I trust them.”

Regina can’t resist then, reaching up reflexively to brush those tresses back behind an ear.  “Take the car, I’ll take a cab.”  Passing off the brown bag filled with the tarts and the sweet rolls, she gestures for a taxi.

“Babe, she’s bullshitting you,” Emma says, one more time, before shutting the cab door.

It’s for the money, and her papi’s will, Regina tells herself and rubs the pads of her fingers over her heart, the muscle feeling stiff in her chest.

—

The cab circles the busy downtown block.  Regina asks him to circle one more time, then one more time after that before she tells him to let her off miles up into the Lower East Side and takes the train back downtown to work.

It’s laughable, but she can’t help herself.

Regina’s curious:  _Has her mother changed at all?_

_Hasn’t she herself?_

—

“How long has she been out?”

He barely spares a glance up from the television.  “One episode.”

Really, she should turn on more lights for him, but she’s touchy and teary and too exhausted to be rational about Emma not being home, so, she doesn’t and he doesn’t seem to notice her, standing awkwardly, and anxiously she stares at him.  He isn’t here for her, she has to remind herself.  He’s ten, he isn’t a band-aid.

In the hall, she peeks in on their toddler – sees her sitting up in the crib, sucking on a bottle and holding the stump of her bunny’s make-believe hand like she so often does to self-soothe, sees her small and soft – and she loses her nerve with her little one too.  Heart a mess, Regina retreats for the bedroom.

Quickly, she tosses keys, her work bag, her handbag, and her blue coat on the bed.  Quickly, she pops off her heels and stalks out to the balcony for the cloudy broken up sky.   _Because her Mama didn’t love her right_ ,  _her Mama didn’t love her right_.  Her lips tremble as she repeats it out to Gotham river, like Hail Marys, tosses it in the inky rippling with all the other dead bodies and poorly kept secrets.

People don’t forgive or forget in Gotham.  They take it to the river.

So, she thinks about losing her mother’s body to the flow, she pictures the slow slip and the black plastic cover, and she purses her lips as the cold water rushes up her nostrils.  This she can make sense of, this blackness.

“Regina?”  He calls and her head bobs up at the pitch of her name.  “Can I come in?”  He knocks then, like he tacks on  _please_ then, and she snorts, her breath aflutter.  He knocks again.  "Regina?“

Dabbing at her nose, she turns from the balcony on a sniffle and opens an arm out for him.  “Yes, Henry.”

He pads on his socked feet out to the balcony next to her and offers up a plate covered in tinfoil.  “Emma told me to remind you.  She said you wouldn’t remember to take it out of the oven.”

“Thank you, Henry,” she says, breathlessly, eyes glassy, and takes the plate and two forks from his tense little hands.  Eagerly, he scampers back in for the vanity chair next.  “Careful.”

“I can do it,” he swears and she lets him this time.  Putting the chair right up against the railing like usual, he clambers up on his knees and beams at her.  “Can I have some?”

“I have two, don’t I?”  Pulling her lips in a brief smile, Regina passes him a fork and picks at her plate, holds it low between bites for him.

The company keeps her from thinking too much about the impact of  _splat!_  of hitting the sidewalk from this height.  Because a bit of bad-footing and it could happen (and her chances are greater than most).

“I like your arroz con pollo better.”

Regina sucks the salt from her bottom lip and stares at him, amused by his passably curled R’s.  “Emma likes to substitute.  How do you know that’s what it’s called,” she asks.

“Rosabelle.  One time, she told me, it’s her favourite thing to do.  So, we helped her cook sometimes.  She taught us.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Sometimes.  They fired her.  I don’t know where she is.”

“I’m sorry,” Regina says, her throat too tight to say it better than a scritch.  But she holds the plate as still as she can for him as he shovels more food in.  “My papi taught me. He isn’t a very good cook, but … I miss him sometimes …” she doesn’t like to refer to him in the past tense.

The two of them were having a blowup, she was screaming and his heart just gave out and that’s not acceptable to her.  So she doesn’t like to talk about him like that, like he isn’t a person anymore simply because he died.

“How long does a stakeout take?”

“Emma will back tonight, honey.  It won’t be like last time.”

“Do you think Emma likes me?”  Her fork scrapes to a stop; they haven’t talked, haven’t had half a sentence about who this boy holed up in their home is even supposed to be to each of them; ‘like’ is a big step — “I mean, I can tell  **you** like me.  It’s okay, I like you too.”

He is so much braver than she was at ten years old and looking for that better place.

Regina bunches her brows in, pressing on the tickle at the seam of her lips.  “I didn’t like you at first.”

“Me too,” he says, and this big warm smile splits her open.

“Finish the plate,” she chuckles.

He plunks his bum on the chair and happily cleans up the food meant for her.  “Regina,” he mumbles after his third pile in, too much stored in his cheeks, “are you and Emma married?”

“No.  We’re not,” she says, pressing the scoop of her back against the balcony rail, hugging her arms in at the chill in the air.

“But, you’ll still be my mom, right?”

Regina falters.  “I suppose, I would be.  Yes.”

He thinks for a moment, then hides his face in the chalky coloured plate.  “Because you love Emma.”

That hits her funny.

Her stockinged feet are cold and she squishes her toes together, staring down at them.  He finishes the plate and it’s quiet.  Too quiet.  He picks at the individual grains stuck to the matte ceramic.  “Henry.  Did you know that you and my papi have the same name?”

—

It’s 2AM, she’s starved.  But she also doesn’t have it in her tonight to be a good girl.

“It’s your favourite, mija.  Please,” he says, needlessly stirring a pot in the crummy kitchen, squinting at her from beneath the one hanging lamp.  It’s the only light that flicks on in her tiny box of an apartment.

“I’m not hungry.”  Her heavy head flops back on the lumpy sofa and slowly she stretches out, toes twitching in pain.

“It isn’t much, I know.  But it was something small I could do.”

The salty muddy smell makes her homesick — a sharpness in her nose, spice over her skin — and crossly, she pinches her face in at the emotion that pricks her like sucking on lemons.  Her papi remembers her favourite meal, and her eyes well and she misses him, but she’s mad at him too, and it hurts her like humiliation and losing control.

“Regina?” her papi bids, still stirring by the stove behind her, the slosh of the stew making her stomach squeeze.

“Go home, Papi.”  Getting her ass slapped bringing drinks these past months has put bitters in her gut.

Nervously, he toddles round the sofa and sits beside her.  “Come home.  It isn’t safe in these parts.”

Between the poorest and the scummiest neighbourhoods, between the sloppy pains and broken backs and bile, Regina’s had her share of near misses, scared stiff each night she walks the streets after work.  But of course, that’s the point.

He hovers.  “It would break your mother’s heart to see you like this.  You know, she worries.  Every day, she asks me and I think —”

“Papi, no.”

His sad expression crumples up into a bashful kind of shame, and she doesn’t want to move.  Her landlord is a hardy Portuguese lady who pounds her door bi-weekly for the rent, and she doesn’t want to move.  “Do you still blame her?”

Regina stares at him and tries not to shake, but tears spill, the salt making her cheeks break out in splotches.

Hands trembling, he tucks back her long tumbles of hair and thumbs across the tracks on her face.  “Oh, my child.”

Muffled shouts from the next apartment punch at the paper thin walls.

—

“What’s this?”  Her eyes sparkle and her heart thumps stupidly at the stumpy mismatched lamps strewn about the big open sleeping bag, the one tall lamp with the bare bulb the only one Regina recognizes; she’s been telling Emma to throw that out for months.

“I uh, I thought we could use a break,” Emma explains, sheepishly swinging their holding hands. “You know.  Just us.  Private time.”

Regina is a little ticklish, a little light-headed from the surprise.  The dishes are still in the sink, the kids are up past their bedtime.  Fluttering her lashes up at her wonderful idiot, she breathes out this shy short laughter then turns back for the stairwell.

“Hey!  Where you going?”

“To change!  Out of my skirt and blouse, and —” the noise Regina makes is soft-core, x-rated, but flat tongues and slow mouths make her whiny and needy every time — it’s what happens — and she bends up weakly against the cozy mohair between the zipper of the long coat she had strong-armed Emma into earlier.

“Don’t change, please?  I piled a bunch of comforters up, there’s a blanket, and me.  You won’t make it back up here,” Emma pouts, massaging with her thumbs.

“Fine, fine,” Regina says, and it fizzes off their lips between short peppered kisses.  “Fine,” Regina says, one more time, and smiles as an excited Emma leads them over to the schmaltzy rooftop spot, lamps up on the parapet stamping the sooty night sky in toasty warm yellow blots.  The brick is hard at her achy back, but the striped woolen blanket makes up for it a little.  Regina hikes up her skirt to fold her legs in, her feet in a pair of short boots she had pulled on out of ease, flat boots that belong to Emma, and she scoots in closer to lay her head on a shoulder.

Making a loop with that arm, Emma opens up that shoulder for her, and holds her.  “This was a good one though, right?”

“Yes,” Regina says, nodding and breathing in, breathing in the smell of coffee and roasted nuts; stakeout snacks.  “Good surprise.”

“Okay.  Good.  Just checking,” Emma says, tugging at the blanket up her hip.

They have maybe twenty minutes.  They shouldn’t more than thirty.  They sit in silence and she could sleep like this, in the open air and the small comforts …

… and to think, her mother told her not to love …

“… she’s checked in at Gotham Royal, ‘for now and who knows’,” Regina lets slip, like simple, like mundane.  “Kathryn called to check on me.  Explain the newest clauses, and when she told me, in that exact phrase, I hung up on her.”

The first time Regina told Emma about her mother was in bed, early on in those first attempts at an actual relationship, bare breasts cold in the early hours, face mashed into a pillow as the tears went and as she murmured in slow broken spurts, and they had fucked and fucked for hours more after that, and it was fine.

Except, in the late morning sun, Regina had woken up to a fuming Emma and a broken toaster.

Bunched up in tight curls right up against her this time, Regina can feel the rumbling in and out of each breath from her.  “Mother would say that a lot.  For now and who knows.”

“Well, she doesn’t know me.  I mean,  **I know**.  I’m not perfect, but —” and Emma loses herself for a moment to the pissed off emotion that breaks like roiled surf up her nose — because Emma has hurt her, regretted and learned and really fought to be better for those honest-to-god second chances, and she has hurt back, but as soon as her past comes up, it’s shame and it’s helplessness, and at times Emma isn’t able to hold it back for her — “this is not who knows.”

Regina swallows hard and it takes a minute, but she manages to croak, “I don’t need perfect.”

Tenderly (taking her time to be tenderly) Emma rolls her head on the brick and plants a kiss to the top of her scalp, through all her thick dark hair, like a seed to soil.  “Okay,” she croaks back, and that’s it then, for several minutes.

Not that there isn’t more to talk about, but she thinks – triage – and half-closes her heavy lidded eyes.

“Henry told me, by the way.”

“Told you what?”

“That he ate most of your dinner.”

Even her lips feel heavy.  “He’s like you …”

“Will you make me your bacalao?  For later?”

—

They don’t actually have salted cod but the haddock holds up fine for a quick substitute.  Regina turns off the stove and puts the lid back on the pot for Emma to heat up after patrol.  Her little Sola snuffles in her neck, finally asleep again.  Henry lightly snores on the sofa.  Leaving the light above the stove on, she moseys on back to the bedroom.

Everyone is accounted for.

Gently prying the neck of her cotton robe from Sola’s pint-sized fist, Regina settles her itty bitty girl in the middle of the bed, then slips away to brush her teeth.

This is her life now, and she doesn’t need her mother to know how much better she did for herself, she doesn’t.

Regina’s sitting on the bed, rubbing in lotion when the comm beeps on her bedside table.  “Bored, are we?”

There’s a pause, then a _drip! dripdrip!_  as the comm links up.  “Don’t freak out,” Emma says, heavy and breathy, and it’s _dripdrip! drip! dripdripdrip!_  as she tries not to clutch to the comm too hard.  “I’m in the sewers.  Got shot, in the arm.  Got lost.  I need you to tell me I’m an idiot, then tell me which way is home.”

“How —” Regina’s lungs seize up, “how bad is it?” she asks, and it’s like an allergic reaction, how her body breaks out in emotion, and she stands, a bit frantic, as she runs her palm over Sola’s tubby tummy — still breathing — and scuttles out to the main room.

Henry tosses, tangled up in the thick knit, and she hesitates for a barely there kind of moment before she’s up those stairs to the control platform.  The monitors flicker on in a series of bright blue glints off her big square reading glasses.

“Tell me I’m an idiot.”

“You’re the biggest idiot,” Regina spits, in the softest tone she can, while she pinpoints a location.  “I’m coming to you.”

“No, you’re not.  I’m fine.  I can walk —”

“— and I’m picking you up, in plain clothes, in the car.  Suck it up, Batman.  Now, how bad is it?”

“Looks like a .45, lodged, bleeding, but I can see it.”

Maybe  **it is**  time to have that talk.  Feeling slivers of light shimmer by her shoulder, Regina looks up and of course he’s up and at the top of the stairs, and she should lie because he’s ten and it’s an important secret, but she doesn’t want to, she realizes, she doesn’t want to be like her mother.

It’s a first step.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence starts here.

 

_Previously on[Episode Three](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12580592/chapters/28708152)_

_Opening titles.  Soft percussions under slinky brass.  Rooftops for miles.  Coats blow in the wind and a hat flies off a head.  People collide on the slick streets.  Lightning strikes and illuminates the cracked face of a stone gargoyle.  The bell tolls at the top of a foreboding cathedral and swinging side to side, reveals glimpses of two bodies twisting together, backlit by the midnight sky, kissing.  The Bat and The Cat, pointed ears puncturing the clouds, kissing._

 

_Episode Four: Ready Made_

 

 

 

Emma liked the life she had.  Removed.  Just the two of them.  Private and compact in function.  

It’s a loose thought she mulls in the elevator with a thankful arm thrown up on those small shoulders, ribs opening out with each laboured breath into the firm hold Regina has round her middle, old zip up and a warm coat draped over the shoulder of that shot arm of hers.  

Regina digs her fingers in, digs and re-digs, but it’s like she’s struggling to root them in soft dirt and not ribs.  Head level, her back is pinched though from how she’s holding her anxieties in check, bulky duffel hanging from her exhausted frame, and it makes her look put out and short in a pair of flat boots.  

It’s been years since either have been more than grazed by bullets.  Regina isn’t taking it well this go round; rescuing her from a manhole, stripping the cape and equipment into black plastic, slipping a button-up on her, dispensing blankets and heat packs to prevent trauma, liquids and antibiotics – for all her efficient and decisive fuss, she had remained silent and brittle the whole car ride home.

Regret twists up Emma’s cheek, feeling that pull like roots at her heart, that it’s time to quit this, stop risking this – losing the person she loves most to a purpose she doesn’t.  If she’s honest it’s become more a fixation than a mission, and it’s not like she chose this, to become a false hero to Gotham.   _Haven’t they earned a chance at selfish?_

Regina is all thumbs with the keypad and fob.  The duffel drops to her elbow and she has to more or less kick and tackle the door to get them both in. 

“You left the lights on?”

Home, at last, the shout startles them before they even have a chance to step out of their short front hall into the kitchen – “Emma!”  The kid bounces down from the buzz of the control platform all buck teeth and round wondrous eyes at her.  “Emma,” he repeats, a pin at a balloon.  He has the baby monitor clutched in his hand.  Gulping, he darts his tizzy at Regina first, then tentatively asks, “Are you okay?”

Emma inhales, disoriented.  Their apartment is flooded in soft whites and harsh artificial blues, damn near all possible lamps switched on, including the miniatures under the kitchen cabinets.  “Henry, I’ll need your help,” Regina says, diverting him with instructions for a simple set-up in their private bathroom.  He sneaks looks as he listens, as if he has a secret in his mouth, hard sweets he isn’t allowed to have.

It takes a beat, but it clicks.  “You told him?”

 

–

 

**24 hours is all it takes:**

Hot and baring her teeth in pain, Emma stares at Regina, stares after each anxious twitch and tic from her, stares as she remains head down, clinical, and obsessive about how she cleans the wound.  The flattened bullet sits in a bowl from the kitchen (the chipped one she likes her cereal in).  Next time she hisses, wild and raw, dumb with pain (and heartache), Regina flinches, her nerves shot and flushed from the added pressure and attention.

It looks like a lot of blood but her arm is intact, no broken bones or nicked arteries.  It offers Emma little relief, the wreck in her chest the one she’s afraid of – chest a blasted mess of emotions she doesn’t know shit all how to fix.

Her teeth set.  “It wasn’t yours to tell.”

Hearing that, Regina retracts her hands, taking a full stop to breathe, to calm her own distress, upset herself at how hostile the response has been.  “Fine, then who am I, Emma?  Who am I in all this?” she asks, clinching the forceps, knuckles rising out of her skin.  “Our life is as much mine as it is yours.”

“I’m not the one who left me out,” Emma flares, feeling blindsided by the apparent reversal in that relationship: the kid’s attachment to her, and her belief in him.  To risk them like this.

_How did she make a 180, and without her?_

Regina’s eyes drop, humbling but more to the point hiding herself.  “He loves you,” she says then, soft, and no more.  

How she advocates for the kid, it’s more obvious that she, in fact, loves him.

 

**Hour 3:**

Bandaged and in a sling, Emma’s shock subsides two spoonfuls into her second bowl of bacalao; mistakes it for heartburn at first.  Disappointment rushes in before she can slurp up the rest, spoils her appetite.  Henry’s passed out in his blanket, limbs tossed and carefree, and in the way he sleeps, Emma’s reminded of the heaps of high hopes she herself had to survive in her own misspent childhood, burning up her food pipe as reflux.  

Regina, of course, is busying herself in their bedroom picking up after her, plucking shirts and socks from the floor.  Hearing Emma's heavy breathing, she looks up and hugs the pile of clothes in her arms, uncomfortable being caught over-compensating and straightens up into a self-conscious silence.  

Emma is dead tired but knows better than to let dreams fester.  “He’s fucked now you know that, right?” she blurts, battered form etched into the dark hall behind her.  

Recovering from a horrible, stricken pause Regina redirects, “I’ll make up the bed for you.”

“No, Regina, I’m not being shut out again,” she replies, in pursuit like old times.  “I’m not running, I’m butting in.  Look!  Isn’t that what you like?”  Emma closes the door.  “He’s fucked –”

Regina puffs and props pillows.  “– There’s no talking to you like this.”

“– but, I’m supposed to think it felt like the right thing to do to you?  I’m supposed to think you hadn’t laid this out, told him for no reason?  Is that it?”

“Emma …”  Head shaking, Regina sighs, “He’s a child, not an imbecile.  He could tell.  He needs us to be honest with him.”

“I can’t believe you, I can’t  **believe** you’ve put me in this corner – twice.”

“Oh, and like I wasn’t?”

“I didn’t make him find us.  It wasn’t a choice.”

“It was to turn your back and shack up with that two-bit ex-boyfriend of yours,” Regina fumes, and it’s a rolling boil, and as the argument unspools and the point sprawls, Emma learns there’s really not that much to it to exploit everything good for the sake of zeroing a sum, leveraging those exact insecurities that she had once sworn to care for – sworn after the laziest love in the afternoons – chasing the pain with a kind of punch drunk resolve to stamp out this misshapen belief that has built up in the neglected places, hanging on to these kids – other people’s kids – for selfish reasons.  

Regina attempts to deflect her to bed multiple times.  They talk in circles.  Over and over.  Exhaust themselves over imprecise details and issues.  Delirium sets in an hour later.

 

**Hour 5:**

Perched on a corner of their bed, shape of her in sharp-cornered lines, her left arm stuck out like lean-to, Regina is mid-rehash of an age-old dispute about calling shots, mid-sentence, when she throws a look up at the clock hanging above their headboard.  Not ten minutes after, their little girl is up and fussing (her usual morning fussing), and the breath, like relief, that she takes is immediate – she takes an immediate breath like ocean air.  

Mouth open, it knocks Emma cold.

One look, then, is all it takes.  Overwhelmingly and in an instant, as their eyes catch, the facts, the actual reasons for the cracked throats and choked debate, the real hurt, become obvious and known and bottoms out in emotion, bends them.  One look, and it’s saltwater and heartbreak.  

“Do it.  Just do it,” Emma shoves.

Regina walks out, hand over her face.   Emma watches,  _because is she even allowed to feel betrayed, sold out for a baby and a ten-year-old?_

Mad and baffled, she brushes at her teeth and makes the wish (bitterly) at her own reflection for the cape and super powers to stop this trainwreck, for the simple outstretched palm of illustrations, then spits.

Regina falls asleep in the armchair in Sola’s room, troubled girl on her chest and baby drool pooling on her delicate pyjamas.  Gripping the jamb, slack-jawed, bleary-eyed, Emma stands there and stares, last one awake, like she’s been left behind.

 

**Hour 10:**

Emma dumps a stack of dishes next to the sink.  “Don’t ignore me, Regina.”

“I’m not,” she snaps back, and slaps the faucet on.

Emma double-checks the kids are out of earshot, annoyed that she has to.  “Did you make promises to him, or not?”

“I don’t know why you think I would?” Regina snarls, before going back for the cups, bailing on the conversation.

Later, in the hall she tells Emma, “I didn’t think you wouldn’t want him,” a basket of fresh clothes in her arms, hushed and remorseful, "so, I didn't think it'd be a problem."

Emma scoffs.  “World’s shittiest mom, that’s me.  You made sure of that.”

Her face blackens at that, burnt like toast.  “If you’re just going to deliberately misinterpret everything I –” too riled to further retaliate, Regina shuts herself in the bedroom.  Which leaves Emma the control platform.  Which isn’t private.

Dinner is unbearable, the chatter cold and fake.  Therefore, when it comes time to put the kids to bed, Emma shows up and attempts to lend a hand, but it's fraught and gets competitive having to insert herself at every turn.  “I’m not heartless,” she mutters as she towels off Sola’s hair.

Regina plugs in a blow dryer.  “I wouldn’t know.”

“Say it again,” she goads, in a reproachful tone.  Regina glares, then thinking about it, dissolves into a glum silence.  “Here, sorry,” Emma says, and lifts their little girl up on the counter.  

It’s compulsive between them.  Twists them up to be at odds.  But in the end, Emma is still stuck in her head, mistrustful, and isn’t even sure what she needs but for her to take it back.

 

**Hour 21:**

“I didn’t want to lie him,” Regina explains, again, balanced on the lip of the tub.

Leaning back on one of their bathroom sinks, Emma rubs the sleep deprived burn from her eyes.  “But that’s what we do.  We lie, that’s our whole life,” she hisses, struggling to keep it down for the kids.

“Yes, we lie when we have to, but we don’t lie to each other.”  Regina is immovable.  “Do we?”

It’s a call out, but it’s earnest too, hurt and afraid even – “No, of course, no, but that – that, that’s not the same as – this is not the,  **he** is not the same,” she tries, and winces.  Her shot arm throbs.  “I don’t get this thing you have all of a sudden, this need to be honest.  I mean, honest for what?”

That hits a soft spot.  Regina’s hunched shoulders shake.  “He heard me, Emma.  What was I supposed to do?” she asks, less than a croak, face exhausted, scrubbed of make-up and rough-hewn by recent stress.  “He looked at me, and it looked like how you look at me, like he could count on me, and – how – how, Emma?  How can you now demand me take back what I told him?  How do I even do that?” she shoves back then, more than accuses, at last, and it echoes off the tiles.  Sighing, Regina pleads, “Can we  **please** talk about this tomorrow?”

Miserable, and at a loss, Emma shakes her head like she means to be callous.  “What you did was stupid, Regina, really fucking stupid,” she says, then plucks a bottle of painkillers from a mirror cabinet and throws herself under the covers.

 

**Hour 24:**

“I meant for it to be good,” Regina breathes at 3:09 AM, blows it across the creases of their pillow cases.

It hadn’t ever occurred to her to tell the kid.  What that means is still up for debate.  

“It doesn’t feel good,” Emma replies.

 

–

 

Like it’s in his DNA, the kid surveils them, tracks the distortions of their relationship from then on with his nose stuck in a kind of displeased concern as if it’s personal to him too, and that eats at Emma.

One part guilt and one part resentment over how he’s co-opted their life.  

The fact she could resent him at all makes her feel like a kid herself, or an ass, or invalid even.  

Regina, sure enough, takes great pains to protect and equip him, limits information and outlines strict instructions, teaches him basic protocols and provisions for specific outcomes.

“He shouldn’t be learning that crap,” she says, legs crossed up on a low slung chair in the cozy corner by the balcony of their bedroom, scrolling transcripts of police chatter on a laptop.  “He shouldn’t be copying us.”

Regina pads out of their bathroom for a pot of cream on the dressing table; add-on shelves built right into the wall, floating slabs of pine punched into the concrete, it had been a move-in surprise Emma had slaved over.  How six years can feel like a lifetime, like out of reach, so soon, makes her stomach lurch.

“He doesn’t know what it means,” Emma adds then, and retreats to her screen.

“Did you know that he stayed on the streets the entire time before he found us?”

He hasn’t shared one fact about his life with Emma.  Her head raises in shock.

“That’s five months.”  Head tilted, plaintive and distant, Regina spreads the cream down her straining neck, then disappears inside their walk-in.

Emma makes herself look after that, stares at him, as terrified as she is to relate to him, to think of him as that kick and flutter that she had carried inside her for all those months on her own.  Stuck at home with him all week she discovers how much she’s missed.

For one, he’s taken up Regina’s orderliness; how he stacks dishes, folds his blanket, lines up his limited belongings next to his backpack, it’s made him more responsible and assertive, and she’s reminded of stolen cars and bus depots.  It’s a loaded contrast.  

He’s doggedly protective of their little girl.  Constantly checks up on her, keeps track of what’s she’s up to, treating it like his own special mission.  It’s like he relates, the fact that she doesn’t like to be left on her own.  He must be reporting back to Regina too, she's guessing, the pair and their ritual of tucking in and murmuring at each other on the couch, catching up like eight-to-ten hours apart is too much.

He also likes to tell stories.

Cleaning up odds and ends, Emma doesn’t mean to eavesdrop on them, clinging to a cloth and spray bottle.  Bunny in her lap and sunlight in her scruffs of bed hair, uncharacteristically mellow and especially patient post-nap, Sola sits listening to Henry’s tall stories and recycled plotlines.

His head perks up then, alerted to Emma’s presence, and in the pause his nose twitches as if he’s expecting her to scamper off on him.

Emma’s clear that she deserves it, and more.  “Sorry, do you mind?” she asks instead, then parks herself on the padded dining bench, leaning her good elbow up on the kitchen table in the most awkward attempt at casual.

He’s cautious at first and loses himself in excited rambles later about the first comic he ever read and how it showed him that he could be a hero too.

“Like you.”

“Don’t.  Call me that.  I’m not what you think, kid.”

 

–

 

_Wahhahh! Wahh! Hicc! Wahh!_

Neither of them like getting up in the mornings and as luck would have it, both their girl and the kid are early risers.  

Off and on, Sola’s whines have been on blast for the last hour, but the monitor is on the other side, behind a water glass and Regina’s reading glasses.  Pressing herself further into bed, Emma swallows the salt in her throat, reluctant still, to take turns like they used to.  One week from October, and their extended standoff has bleached the ease and rosiness from their routine.

It’s uncalled for, she knows.  Still, it sticks like thin translucent fish bone in her throat.

Out of the blue, Regina takes a frantic pat at the blankets and blonde tresses in Emma’s face, and it’s odd, but she seems to calm after a serious listen, as if to check that Emma hasn’t suffocated herself like the fool that she is.  Regina straggles out of bed then, and after a stint in the kitchen has to plop their baby girl and a bottle in bed between them she's so beat and in need this week.  Even half-awake Emma can read her.  Blearily, she spies on them feeling her knotted heart ache: rubbing a thumb over her cottony tummy as their toddler suckles, Regina is out cold in minutes, the tiniest tick of a smile back in one corner.  

It feels stupid to be upset, but she is.  Jealous.

Miniature hands squish and slap at them as soon as the bottle is finished, not letting them sleep for more than ten minutes at a time.  Emma readily (and only sort of kindly) slow shoves their toddler off her neck and into Regina's nose.  Now and again, Regina mumbles to her sweet pea in soft-hearted tones.

Emma takes their toddler out the minute Sola starts to babble back.  “Henry, you up?”

Hair like tattered twine, she sets the kids up with breakfast and cartoons, then tosses herself back in bed, a sack of concrete, hands and toes a little too close to Regina’s hot soft skin.  Pettily, she mutters, “Too tired to be mad.”  

Huddled beneath layers of pale blankets and bed linen, Regina hears it and has to take a sharp breath in before she dares to move a careful inch closer.  Emma reciprocates, pinching the loose pyjama fabric at Regina’s stomach in puckers between her knuckles, holding on, repeating in her head like a self-help tape …

Like it or not, what’s done is done.  What’s left now is love her or lose her. 

…  _love her or lose her._

–

 

Sirens screech; scatters of near distant booms and cracks; it’s a Gotham howl for a damp October night on the outskirts of Chinatown.  The whole country is on a precipice and the city has practically vowed to do it’s worst in response.  Emma tucks her slim jim in her jacket, flicks up a middle finger and a “fuck you”, and books it like the hubbub is for her.  

For a minute she could almost pretend they sound like party favours.  

Surprise, surprise:  _another banner year._

 _Fpphsmakk!_   Out of nowhere, the collision takes them both out in an explosion of limbs.

“What the fuck!” she barks and scrambles off the pavement to pick up her glasses.  “Hey fucker!”  Rashly, she scuffles with him but he tears himself free, lumbers for the side street she came out of and she’s after him like it matters.  “Who d’you think you are!”

“Shut up,” he spits.  Helicopter blades whip up the skies several blocks over.  Emma’s head snaps up to the thick clouds.  Desperately, he yanks her down the stairs of a sublevel before the sound of sirens and horns burst up the cross street off the main boulevard, and bounce into the small side street where they are huddled.

“The hell you running from?!”  He hisses in a breath and elbows her off of him.  “Shit.”  Emma’s act softens out as he looks up at her, doubled-over and  _drip! drip!drip!_  dulled from blood loss.  Gulping, she mumbles “Lemme see,” and reaches.  

He puts up a tepid fight but his coat pulls apart.  Easy, like brown packaging paper.  

Emma is agog at the shit she’s in.

“Don’t tell, kid,” he says then, rueful.  Law and order wails and wails all around them.

 

–

 

“Regina!”  Her heart kicks out painfully as she wakes.  “Regina!”  Beside her, blankets flipped in the air, Emma sprints out of their open bedroom.  Dully, a man’s voice sifts out from the ambient television noises.  Much slower to react, Regina fights to catch up, nabbing her robe from the chair in the corner, fists flailing into the sleeves.

Her shoulders hitched, clutching the front of her robe, Regina stops short at the kitchen table and looks on, short of breath.  Emma snatches some bills from a delivery man and kicks him out the door.   _Domino’s._   From behind two stacked boxes, Henry chirps, “Look, Sola!  Pizza’s here!”

They must’ve overslept.  Regina’s bed hair sticks to the back of her hot neck and it takes her a minute to remember the two twenties she tucked in his backpack for emergencies.

“Kid!  What the hell!”  Emma stomps in after him.  Her lungs are steaming hot and it flushes her face pink, fueling her getting right to interrogating him on specifics, pushing him on details.

“Emma –”  Regina’s dry throat splinters the sound, the false alarm still beating on her sternum.  “He ordered take-out, Emma.  It’s fine,” she tries, even but firm.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”

“Buying pizza isn’t talking to strangers.”

“It’s letting strangers into the apartment!”

“Emma, this isn’t helping,” Regina tries again, firm but urgent, taking a couple steps, having a hard time stopping herself shoving them apart, stooping to protect him.  Emma is gasoline this morning and lighting matches ill-advised.

“That could’ve gotten us killed, you know that – and he should know, too, for that matter!”

“I can take care of myself –”

“Yeah, that’s what you think.  You’re a kid –”

“– I found you all by myself, didn’t I?”

Emma flounders.  Thick tendons in her neck flex.  “You want us all to die?  Is that what you want?  You want to die?”  Her last rebuke squeals out on a choke of emotions.

“Enough, Emma!”  Forceful as Regina is, her lungs squeeze hard on Emma’s name to feel that panic of hers, knowing it intimately for what it is.  Where it’s history lives.  But he’s her priority here, he has to be.  “We’re fine.”

“You don’t know that,” Emma reacts, teeth bitten in a kind of hard-headed denial, “ **He** doesn’t know that, and that isn’t fine, it isn’t –”

“Well, it will have to be,” she retorts, irritated, and afraid all of a sudden.  Everything feels too breakable.  Emma turns her head from them and rubs at her mouth to stem her freak out and other related resentments.  One hand gripping the top of her robe, Regina stretches her other hand for him.  He plods to her and hauling him in she crouches to his level.  “Henry, why don’t you bring us some plates?”  Giving him a soft look, Regina attempts a smile.  Lo and behold he listens.  The loud clatter confirms he’s more upset than he will ever let on; all of them much too alike.  

Regina, letting her robe fall back apart on her open chest, cuts across the room hands first, hands tender as can be.  Hanging on to that taut arm, Regina touches her nose to that turned cheek and tells Emma, “Don’t.”

“Don’t do that,” she throws back in her face, collides their noses, “I know what I did.”

“Then  **you** don’t.  Be pissed at me.  Be pissed at yourself.  But don’t you take it out on him.”

Emma’s mouth is stiff and stubborn.  Keeping her eyes open, brows knit, Regina kisses that mouth – soft but to the point – in hopes of salvaging what she can.  Emma doesn’t kiss her back.  Quickly, her hands move to tie up her robe as cover, but it doesn’t stop the hurt from pricking her cheeks red, like a direct hit.

“Don’t you have to work?”

“It’s Friday, I’m taking it off,” she says, tersely, both arms bent out for her little Sola.

They eat to an episode of _Batman: The Brave and the Bold_.  Henry sits hunkered at the coffee table, sheltered, on the other side of her knees.  Emma is on the floor too, nose in the pizza boxes, constantly, like a hound.

“Why is it always Bruce Wayne?”   

“They write about Terry too.”

“What was he like?”  Henry asks, casually.

Regina recalls the spectre of his Batman from that time, the polarized opinions about what he stood for, the onslaught of sensationalized media at his death by state militia and the subsequent cover-ups and politicized rhetoric.  But the man himself, she knows only sketches from Emma.  He’s a banned topic.  “I never met him.”

“How come they don’t know you’re a girl, Emma?”

Regina darts a look at Emma, shrewd about wearing thin their welcome on these matters.  Mouth full, Emma folds up a fresh slice, stuffing it in all the same and ignores them.  “Emma uses it to her benefit,” Regina says.  

The animated Batman makes a smart-ass remark; it isn’t real but she stares at the cartoon, and feels alone.   

“Regina …” he stops himself to prop a plump cheek on his fist, precocious, pensive even, to a fault.  Wonder Woman swoops in, kicks a criminal in bold basic colour.  “Does that mean you’re a villain too?”  

Call it naive, but she’s been off hard crime for more than ten years; in all the stress and melodrama she didn’t think how he would make links to her past actions and how it would affect his acceptance of her in his life, as fixated as he is on morals and salvations.  Emotion splutters at the back of her throat, and she breathes, and blinks, but the shore is far.  “Yes, Henry.  I was.”

He doesn’t react, keeps his focus on the action sequence onscreen.  Her impulses to explain this and explain that make the room spin.  Her head bobs out for the kitchen, for a distraction, an anchor, a reminder, and this time Emma is there – steady briny eyes on her, knee deep in that same ocean, ready to reach for her.  Married or not, it’s real, their union.  Tossing the Hawaiian back in its box, Emma scrunches at a kleenex, then dissatisfied, rubs the lingering grease off one hand using her sweatpants.  Regina huffs out her nose but it’s fond and full of fidelity for the big-hearted fool as she sidles up to the sofa.  

For the rest of (so-called) breakfast Emma’s clean hand makes a home above her knee.

What she means to do is seldom what she does, Regina knows.  It isn’t news.

_Only, what is she supposed to do about it?_

–

 

Hot water batters the bottom of the tub in their bathroom.  “Do you know why Emma yelled?”

“I know why,” Henry says, headstrong, toes fidgeting on the tile.  “It’s because Emma cares.”

Regina breathes through the ache.  “She does, yes.  But that doesn’t make it okay, Henry.  Do you understand?  That there are right ways and wrong ways to care?”

 

–

 

_Fzzzt!  Schnik! Fzzzt!  Schnik!_

Hunched on the couch in the dimness, splashed in nothing but lamplight, Emma retracts and extends, retracts and extends a box cutter, and thinks – four cuts, a trapezoid – bat suit pooled on the floor, bat cowl hung on blunt fingertips.

The same old picture materializes: blonde hair tossing in the pitch black, a marker, of the hero  **she** is.  The hero she wants to be, at least.

“He’s in the tub with his action figures.”  Regina is small in her bare feet, and even smaller with her arms square across her stomach.

Emma nods, makes a face to herself then, at how bonded those two have become.  

“Don’t use that.  You’ll cut yourself.”  Regina is spooled up tight and pensive and it’ll cause that old pain at the back of her neck later.  “Here, let me –”

“No, there’s no point.”  Emma tosses the suit and box cutter on the coffee table.  Her recovering arm spasms from the sudden motion, forcing her to extend through the stiff aches.

“Move,” she softly orders, brushes past Emma’s knees and sits, careless and close.  Pulling the injured arm into her lap, Regina plies her thumbs into the scarred muscles.  “I shouldn’t have told him without talking to you first.  I shouldn’t have taken that from you.”

“Yeah.  Well, I should have told you I had a kid that one time.”

Regina frowns.  “I have things I don’t tell you.”   Neither of them mean for their apologies to come out as cheap shots.  “I’ve been selfish, Emma.”

Hearing that shakes loose the fact that so has she.  Selfish and unfair.  From the other end of the apartment, the dryer tumbles and tumbles, a rhythmic bass layered beneath their patchwork breaths, and before long a quiet closeness forms.  One she can’t help but observe like Gothic church, struck into silence.  Her elbow bucks a bit in pain.

“There?”

Emma nods, blowing out a breath.  “Isn’t he too old for toys in the bath?”

“What’s old?  He’s too grown up as it is.  Would you relax your arm, please?”

Emma snorts, because she’s missed her, missed the hell out of that tender loving bossiness of hers.  “Do you think he stole those?”

“His action heros?  I think he … did the best he could.”

“Does that mean he takes after you or me?” she asks.  Regina’s mouth twitches, and it’s the sweetest twitch.  To rediscover it.  To earn it back.  “I’ll apologize to him after.”

Regina’s thumbs soften to chase freckles on Emma’s forearm.  “Good.”  Her chin is low, her head is solemn.  “Does that mean you will talk to me too, now?”

Looking at this person that she loves, and loves more than she could ever love herself, Emma hates that it isn’t easier.  “I’m not ready to be his mom,” she says, low and breathless, “but that’s not your fault.”  Regina’s eyes flick up – starry black and boundless in the dim room – and it’s astounding how much they hold for her, how  **obviously** they still hold for her, and here she’s been behaving like she could be replaced, diminishing everything that they had fought so hard for.  Discounting their partnership.  Her chest opens (a deep breath is all it takes) and there it is then, that trust she thought she had misplaced, like keys – “He’s been on his own for so long he’s looking for someone to save him.  Regina, he wants a hero.”

“Is that what you think I promised him?”

“I think it’s what he thinks.”

The dryer stops tumbling and beeps, distracting them, making them glance out, both still on edge after the morning's scare.  “Is that really so bad?”  Their eyes return, in unison. 

“It’s way too much to live up to, you and me.  I’m not special because I gave birth to him.  Now he thinks I’m one of those characters from his comics.”

“If he thought that he’d have nothing to do with me,” she says, and it’s supposed to be reassuring but Regina is clearly struggling to reconcile her super (once upon a time criminal) identity with her role in his life too, her brows twitching and a disquiet forming in her expression, to think about her old self and her worst choices.  

Head dipping, Emma’s stomach shrivels up in guilt and shame over her own suspect choices leading to her making the decision to sign a closed adoption on her kid.  “I don’t think I would’ve wanted him to know.  Ever.”

Responding to her hangdog routine, Regina is firm but understanding, embracing of her faults.  “He couldn’t live like that.  We couldn’t raise him like that.  Unless, you mean ...“  Catching on then, her posture goes rigid.  

“His proof that I’m his biological mom might not even be real.”  Shrugging, she feels pathetic.  “It could all be a mistake.”

Regina, looking nauseous as she strings her thinking together, has to open her mouth for a couple long breaths before asking, “Do you really not want any of this?  I thought the problem was giving him false expectations but if I forced you into something you – before you could –”

“Regina, no,” she interrupts, “it’s not the same.  Shit."  Hand on her cheek, Emma thumbs Regina’s lips apart and like instant mix the two of them are both sucking in air too hard to be sitting on the couch like this, hot and hopelessly pent up for one another.  “He needed you thinking about him.  I get that.  It had nothing to do with me.  Setting me up or something.”  The self-disgust in those beautiful glimmering eyes recedes with every stroke her thumb makes and she could go on forever, bringing her everything in her clumsy hands.  She’s been a moron.  “I know you said he loves me, but you’re the one he loves.  The way you’d do anything for the people who deserve you.”  

“Emma –”  The dryer beeps again.

“I’m here.  I’m over it.”

Regina hangs her fingers on Emma’s collarbone, her open palm resting over the beating in her chest like she wants to know how to hold the noise in her sore hands, as proof.  For when she's scared and unsure.  “I didn’t think we should, but, I did think about them.  Having children with you.”

Emma’s tongue sticks as her mouth opens in surprise.  “Them?  As in more than one?”

“Yes, ‘world’s greatest detective’, as in more than one.”  But then embarrassed, Regina flips her gaze down.  Slowly, the corners of her mouth release.  “Three, actually.”

“Three?”

It comes out much too much like a chuckle.  But, she smiles, the love of her life smiles, so, Emma lets it be.  

 

–

 

“Okay, it’s really quiet sex in bed like right this second, or I mean, if you’re really up for it, roughing it on the roof,” she says after shutting the door, returning from a third round of putting their cranky toddler down.  It isn’t even in the ballpark of romantic but it can’t be helped.

“Well, we’re not twenty and it’s cold outside,” Regina complains, exhausted arms careless as she pulls back the extra blankets, and sheets, and slips off her robe.  “Emma, I don’t want to be quiet.”

“I know, babe, but I’m tired, but I want to fuck you, but the kids,” she counters and lumbers across their bed to her.  Regina stands unconvinced, glaring back with her ‘don’t fuck with me’ face on.  Emma squeezes at the muscle that twines up Regina’s neck, mouth wet and ears hot for her.  “I mean, skipping out to a hotel for a couple hours to fuck, that would be irresponsible, right?”

“You mean as opposed to ridding the city of crime and moral disease?  Reasonable people have babysitters.”

She pushes off Regina’s pyjama bottoms.  “Like you would trust some kid with braces.”

Mouth in a pout like a sap, Regina hums, turned on by how well she is known by Emma.  “Hurry up and kiss me before we have another emergency.”

Held close, in a bundle in bed, their mouths smack, but their bodies don’t quite open up to each other, don’t quite fit in the ways they used to, and it makes them clutch too hard and think too much.  Regina bends an arm back for the lamp.   _Clk!_

Her shoulder is rolled in and tense.  Emma tips a thin strap off a soft peak and sucks on all her tender places.  Even still, Regina is all sharp angles and trembling beneath Emma.  Deep creases in her lids make her look heartbreaking and so threadbare.  Cheek to cheek, Emma tells her “We’re okay, we are,” and listens to Regina let all of this pained air in her out, for once.  “We’re okay,” she repeats, and sets out to prove it to Regina with her mouth, buries kisses by her ear, at the bottom of her throat in place of apologies.  Nosing up the thin fabric at Regina’s stomach, she takes her time to soothe her how she likes, rubs a cheek on that blessed skin between kisses, dots her love like careful breadcrumbs back up to her breasts, throat, mouth … “Regina?”  

She’s fallen asleep, at ease almost, in repose.  Hair like pressed flowers, fanned out in inky whorls round her blank and impossible face, Regina seems to Emma more far off than ever.  Like a sudden disconnected line, there but not there.

Leaving a couple kisses at her mouth rouses her some.  “Hm, Emma?”

“Go back to sleep.”  Rolling off she reaches for the lamp at her side.   _Clk!_

–

 

It’s been eight months since they smacked into each other on the street like meant to be.  Now, he’s hiding out in her crappy one bedroom and it’s impossible to tell if it’s luck, or bad luck.

Gotham’s night air is picking up, sky clogged with smoke and clumps of black clouds.  She secures her hair behind her ears before climbing out onto the fire escape.  Mouth flat, he looks up, spine jammed against the rails.  Heedfully, she sits on the step above his step.  He doesn’t speak so she doesn’t speak.

He has trained her intensely these months but he’s hard to read, still.

“Storm’s coming.”

“We still doing a run in midtown?”  Nervously, she rubs the scabs at her knees.

“Listen, kid.”  He props his bent body on his elbows, his back an animal as he breathes.  “I’m in some real shit, and it isn’t fair of me to ask, but Batman, it’s an idea.  This idea that there is still equal and opposite force in this world.  It’s not justice, not really, okay?  It’s about the right to fight back.  Especially in times like these.”  Meeting her stare, his mouth broadens into a troubled smile, but she scowls at how he can do that in the middle of a speech like this.  “That’s the point.  That’s what you protect.  Yeah?  And make yourself proud because I’m already proud of you.”

He’s dead a month later.  It takes almost four years to accept what he meant for her and stalk the streets for the first time on her own.

 

–

 

Hunched in the shadows up on the bulwark, she flips through comm channels and listens to each of them asleep in their rooms, picks apart the individual tempos of their inhales and exhales as she waits.

It takes 15 minutes for the two cops – visible in the windows across from her perch – to finish their ‘coffee and donut break’.  Pants buckled back up, Curly fiddles with a floorboard, a hidden safe, and stuffs a duffle with the cash left behind for him to distribute.  Next, he rifles through a purse and pockets the crumpled bills he finds, but not before the naked woman leaps up from the bed to tussle him for them.  He shoves her to the floor.  Crew cut in the living room does the same with another purse, except this other woman, stretching into her tank top on the couch, doesn’t bother to oppose.

Quick shot of a grapnel gun takes her to the opposite rooftop; another blitz of motion and she’s stooped on the fire escape attached to the adjacent apartments.  The men exit out into the broad side alley in high spirits.  No radio crackle as they settle into their squad car.

 _Fftunkt!_   Her boots hit the top of the vehicle.  “What the fuk – ?!!”   _Kkshhhh!_

Driver’s side window pulverized, she reaches in and hauls the cop out, bashes his head on the frame several times.  Curly shouts in the passenger seat as he fumbles for what she assumes is his service weapon.  Galled and in a mood, she snatches Crew Cut’s Glock –

 _Kblam! Kblam! Kblam!_   Clear about what it means, this Batman, fires through the roof point blank into the radio console before ditching it to a puddle on the asphalt.

“Give me names.”  Her speech is gravelled and altered.  “From either one of you is fine.”  Hearing that unmistakable rattle of a gun cocking in a terrified hand, she slams onto the hood.  Blunt metal point still looped around her central fingers, she punches through the windshield and drags the man out, then pounds on his head using her right fist before lugging him up to snarl in his bleeding befuddled face.  "Names."

 

–

 

Emma didn’t want kids.

Thing is, being a parent isn’t so natural to Emma.  It feels too tight in the shoulders, short in the sleeves.

Problem is, having kids has been like fresh air for Regina, pinking her skin.

Peeling her suit off in the closet, she redresses in a t-shirt and sweats, and wonders whether the woman who pushed her out had other kids and became a mom after all.  Her stupid arm screams in dull aches.

There’s a beef tongue stew on the stovetop.  It’s still warm.  Bowl in hand, spooning a hunk to her mouth, Emma strolls back into their bedroom, stands at her side of the bed and chews.  Used to be she would wake her.  Sometimes, deliberately sit in bed to eat while Regina would try and try to kick her out, and occasionally even with a smile on.   

The kid is on her buttery leather brown couch.  So, she sucks her front teeth and settles for the kitchen table.  Casually, she opens Regina’s surface book from the office.  Just as she’s about to close the email client a subject line snatches her attention:  **H. Blanchard**.  The sender:  **Slam Bradley**.  Regina reached out to Slam, of all people.  Spoon halfway to her mouth, Emma considers the hypocrisy for a minute, one blessed minute, then clicks open the email thread.

The latest is short and to the point:  **He’s square**.   **It’s Emma**.


End file.
